The Metro Nashville Police Department has not yet released the identity of a man who was shot and killed by officers near a park in Madison after a 30-minute standoff early Thursday morning.
The shooting was the 10th by Nashville police in 2021, and the seventh to be fatal.
Nashville police say they believe the man was a 39-year-old armed with a 9 mm pistol. Excerpted body camera footage released Thursday night shows officers responding to a call of a car left abandoned on West Old Hickory Boulevard in Madison. The video shows officers ducking behind a vehicle as gunshots are fired from the nearby woods. Using a loudspeaker, they order the man to put down his gun.
Police say the man eventually lay down with his gun nearby. When he fired two shots in front of police, Metro Officer Ricardo Cruz fired fatally with his shotgun. Cruz has been with the police department for two years.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has been called to review the shooting. The executive director of Metro Nashville Community Oversight was notified of the shooting, but MNCO members are at a conference out of state and were unable to go to the scene.
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Since the department began keeping track of police shootings in 2005, no more than four have taken place in a single year. Rasheedat Fatuga leads the group Gideon’s Army, which advocates for alternatives to traditional policing. She has called for diverting resources into other community safety efforts; her program has applied for city funding for violence interruption, in which unarmed volunteers work to resolve neighborhood disputes before they become deadly.
“If we’re looking at it just holistically, it just makes sense to do something different. But there’s a resistance to change.”
At a press conference to go over the latest incident, Metro police spokesman Don Aaron acknowledged that the number of shootings this year has raised questions. But he says each case should be seen as unique.
“Please keep in mind the specific facts related to each, the danger our police officers have been put in in 2021, and why they had to respond in the manner in which they did,” he said.
In eight of the 10 shootings, the person who was shot had a gun. Metro police training has long stressed the importance of officers’ firing first when people have weapons, even if it’s not yet clear how much of a threat they are.
Meanwhile, the number of guns in the hands of Tennesseans has soared. Firearm sales have doubled over the past decade, and new state laws have made it easier to carry. Research shows looser gun laws correlate to more people being shot by police.
Nashville police issued two memos to officers over the summer updating them on the state’s gun laws, including a new provision that lets Tennesseans carry without a permit. The memos lay out when an officer can ask to search or detain someone who is armed.
Nashville police have also said after previous shootings that they conduct a review to see if there are any lessons to be learned or changes that should be made to police training.
But as the number of shootings this year has risen, MNPD has not announced any policy shifts in how they deal with people who are armed. They note that Tennessee has allowed people to carry guns for decades, without causing police alarm or to overreact, and they push back on suggestions that their approach might be contributing to the spike.
“Our officers want themselves to go home safe and every citizen to go home safe,” Aaron said. “Unfortunately, there are circumstances that our officers find themselves in, through no account of their own, in which they have to use force to protect themselves and to protect this community.”
This is a developing story. Some things that get reported early on, by the media or law enforcement, could later turn out to be wrong. WPLN News will have updates as the situation develops.
This post was last updated Thursday at 7 p.m.
WPLN’s Paige Pfleger contributed to this report.
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