Metro Police completes audit of body camera footage, but its community oversight board wants changes moving forward

The Metro Nashville Police Department has completed its review of body camera footage that was sent to the Community Oversight Board in past investigations. The department was looking for instances where videos were improperly edited.

In total, 343 videos were reviewed by the police department.

Swearing was found to be muted in three of them.

“We see that this really affected the community, and we want to fix it,” MNPD Commander Carlos Lara told the board at its September meeting. “And we have started taking steps to fix it, such as getting the logs done. We have held people responsible for what has happened. We have addressed it over and over again because we don’t want it to happen again.”

More: MNPD has no record of how much body camera footage was improperly edited. The oversight board says ‘it’s eroding trust.’

But the Community Oversight Board is still interested in whether edits were made to videos sent to other entities, and how the edits were made without supervisors’ knowledge.

“How far did this go above the two folks who weren’t sworn officers?” asks board member Maxine Spencer. “There’s still plenty of questions that are definitely in our purview and that we still need to be able to answer before we kind of let this go.”

The board discussed multiple paths forward, including adopting new software to make sure videos aren’t improperly altered.

Former police officer and board member Mark Wynn suggested that the department should have a sworn officer managing body camera footage instead of civilian employees — who are not under the board’s purview.

“Have someone in command sign off on it, if there’s any changes … so we can go to that person and bring them before this board and say, ‘Why did you sign off on this editing?'” Wynn says.

More: Nashville Police gave the community oversight board edited body camera footage. That’s raising questions about transparency.

Tennessee’s NAACP and the oversight board both called for an external party like the Department of Justice to investigate the censored footage, after it was uncovered that two IT employees were removing swearing from videos without permission.

But the city’s legal department says that an outside group can’t get involved until the board conducts its own investigation. That is underway.