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‘It could wait.’ Police oversight board calls on Nashville to slow the rollout of license plate readers.

By

Paige PflegerWPLN News
Community oversight board director Jill Fitcheard is calling on the city to slow down the roll out of license plate readers.
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The board that oversees Nashville’s police department is calling on the city to slow down the rollout of license plate readers.  

The mayor’s administration filed a resolution to launch the use of the controversial technology, and wants to schedule a public hearing on Dec. 6.    

But the oversight board’s director, Jill Fitcheard, is calling for that hearing to be pushed back.  

“The hearing is too soon to happen without a lot of public input,” Fitcheard said at the board’s Monday night meeting. “People are not going to be interested in doing that in the holiday season. It could wait till January.”

And the hearing isn’t the only thing raising concerns.

Fitcheard says that the board has not seen any policy drafts of how the technology will be implemented. And the oversight board is supposed to be the auditor of the license plate readers. 

“We are working blindly through this process, not getting the information,” Fitcheard says. “And I’m assuming that they were they created some type of form of draft policy. But who vetted it? Who read it?”

She says it’s imperative that both the board, and the public, are aware of the city’s policies surrounding license plate readers, before the program is officially launched — which can’t happen until the Metro Council votes to pass the resolution. 

Paige Pfleger, Criminal Justice Reporter

Paige Pfleger covers criminal justice for WPLN News. She has investigated guns and juvenile justice as a fellow with ProPublica's Local Reporting Network, and her investigation into domestic violence and firearms dispossession won a regional Edward R. Murrow award and was a finalist for an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award and a Livingston Award. She previously covered criminal justice and addiction in Ohio and was named the state's reporter of the year by the Associated Press. Her work has appeared nationally on NPR, The Washington Post, Marketplace, and PRI's The World, and she has worked in the newsrooms of The Tennessean, Michigan Radio, WHYY, Vox and NPR headquarters in DC.

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