Mayor Barry commits to fund body cameras for Nashville police

Mayor Megan Barry says she intends to include funding in her next budget to pay for body cameras for all Nashville police officers, a projected $12 million undertaking that marks a major win for the city’s criminal justice advocates.

Barry on Sunday committed to “full funding” of body cameras as she addressed a meeting sponsored by the advocacy group Nashville Organized for Action and Hope, or NOAH, calling it one way to help improve relations between Nashvillians and police.

Her pledge comes as racial divisions between police and residents have been exposed in cities nationwide, although not as pronounced in Nashville. Barry's administration will formally make the request next spring when she proposes a Metro budget for the 2017-18 fiscal year.

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“In the meantime, we are convening a team with community members to look at all of the issues that are surrounding body cameras and learn what has worked in other communities and what hasn’t,” Barry said. “This is going to increase accountability and enhance community relations and public safety.

“Let me say it again,” she said. “I am committed to working with communities and police to build even stronger relationships, to collect and analyze data and then make policy decisions that lead to more just and equitable outcomes.”

Police body cameras, which provide video footage of arrests and encounters between police and civilians, are considered one way to reduce the potential for police misconduct.

Michael Cass, a spokesman for Barry, said body cameras would require an additional, unclear amount of operating costs in addition to the initial $12 million to launch the program. He said the police department has been studying the issue for several months and pointed to a committee of police and community representatives that would be appointed to review body cameras further.

"The mayor felt it was time to move in this direction for the good of the city," Cass said.

Equipping police officers in large cities with body cameras has become a battle cry for many activists after several high-profile police shootings in recent years of African-American men, some of whom were unarmed.

Some cities, including Nashville, lack body cameras for police despite the attention the issue has received. Others, such as Memphis, are in the process of rolling out their programs.

Don Aaron, a spokesman for Metro Nashville Police Chief Steve Anderson, said the chief was aware that the funding of cameras would be a part of the mayor's prepared remarks Sunday.

Aaron said discussions on the issue began weeks ago between the mayor and Anderson, but he did not directly answer whether the chief supports body cameras for police. He noted that for the past several months Anderson has said Nashville would initiate a camera program at some point in the future.

"We have been on the sidelines observing other agencies’ experiences, positives and negatives, with camera systems," Aaron wrote in an emailed statement.

Aaron said next year's police budget would be "significant" because of an upcoming request for new police officers to staff a ninth precinct set to open in south Davidson County as well as a request of several million dollars to update the technology for in-car computers, which are used for electronic, paperless incident and arrest reports.

Leaders of Nashville's largest organization of officers said they were not part of discussions and are disappointed as a result.

"Any time that the largest representative body of police officers is not even brought to the table on a discussion as big as this, we're going to be disappointed," said James Smallwood, president of the Nashville Fraternal Order of Police. "It's disappointing to see that the administration didn't even bring it to us and say this is what we're looking at."

The Nashville FOP has refrained from offering a position on the body camera proposal until it can review details.

Barry, who pledged support for body cameras during her mayoral election last year, received criticism from criminal justice activists in September for allocating $1 million for ballistic body armor for police. Critics said the move, which the Metro Council approved, represented a step toward the “militarization” of the police force and ran counter to Barry’s campaign pledge.

Nashville attorney Walter Searcy, chairman of NOAH's task force on criminal justice, called the commitment to body cameras "a big step," but said communications between police and communities with high concentrations of minorities still need to improve.

"We understand the politics that swirl around the mayor of any urban community regarding relationships between her police force and her constituents who are not in uniform, particularly when there's a chasm or division between those two groups," he said. "In Nashville, there has not been a broad chasm, but there has been disconnect on certain issues.

"Clearly, the symmetry demanded that if you're going to take $1 million and buy ballistic equipment that you need to go ahead and fulfill your promise of equipping them with cameras that have audio and visual capacity," Searcy said.

Barry's body camera announcement came less than one week after the nonprofit Gideon’s Army released a report that found black residents make up 39.3 percent of all traffic stops in Nashville despite being only 27.6 percent of the population.

During Sunday’s NOAH-sponsored event, Barry said she is committed to greater equity in the criminal justice system.

What 2 million traffic stops show about race and policing in Nashville

“Let me says this: If we are doing something wrong, then I will fix it,” Barry said.

Reach Joey Garrison at 615-259-8236 and on Twitter @joeygarrison.