Above The Law

Editor’s Note

Last week, the Nashville Scene began a two-part investigative series titled “Above the Law.” In Part I, Scene reporter Willy Stern revealed:

♦ How a Nashville private security firm, called Detection Services Inc., abused Hispanics living at apartment complexes the company was hired to patrol. The private security guards towed the Hispanics’ cars, robbed them, and beat them. Employees of the security company focused primarily on illegal aliens, who they knew would not report the abuse for fear of deportation.

This week, in Part II of “Above the Law,” the Scene will show:

♦ How the Police Department has been compromised by its relationship to Detection Services. More than 40 police officers were on the company’s payroll, including two in the department’s Internal Security Division. Internal Security has investigated Detection Services three times. Two probes were seriously flawed, and the third was compromised by an apparent leak of confidential information.

♦ How police officers “double-dipped,” receiving pay from both Metro and Detection Services for work supposedly done at the same time.

♦ How two police officers routinely disclosed confidential police information on Nashville citizens to Detection Services.

♦ How, after Detection Services’ closing amidst a Nashville Scene investigation, a new private security company, controlled by a Metro policeman in apparent violation of department rules, has secured the lucrative contract once held by Detection Services to provide security at the downtown arena. The company, run by Sgt. Mark Garafola, employs many of the same police officers who once worked for Detection Services.

♦ And how Metro Police Department chief Emmett Turner has announced investigations into Detection Services and Garafola’s firm. Also, Nashville mayor Bill Purcell has asked the city’s law director to appoint a committee to study how the city’s minority population can “access the system.”

Pictures of Terry Smith show grotesque black-and-blue bruises covering his legs—undisputed evidence of the baton blows struck by a Metro policeman. Witnesses say the cop, Mike Mann—who was moonlighting as a security guard for the Nashboro Village apartment complex—brutally beat Smith, the building’s maintenance man, without provocation as he lounged around a swimming pool with friends late at night.

“As a civilian, you’d go to jail for beating somebody like that. What gives the police the right to do it?” demanded Barry Littlefield, who joined two other witnesses in filing a complaint with the Police Department.

Two more off-duty policemen and three other guards were there that muggy evening in June 1998—all working for the private security firm Detection Services. In official statements to the Police Department’s Internal Security Division, all six gave essentially the same story—that Smith was drunk and disorderly, and that he raised his fist to strike Mann after the officer told him the pool was closed. Yes, they said, Mann beat Smith as another officer held him down, but Mann used only necessary force.

The Internal Security Division found no official wrongdoing. And that doubtless came as no surprise to Larry Lawson, the owner of Detection Services. According to former employees, Lawson often bragged that he had “Internal Affairs in his pocket.”

Last week, the Scene reported that security officers working for Detection Services beat, robbed, and terrorized Hispanic immigrants and other working-class Nashvillians in an 18-month rampage—all at apartment complexes the company was paid to guard. Acting with impunity, they barged into apartments, waved weapons in the air, and held guns to the heads of residents.

Police Chief Emmett Turner now has opened a criminal investigation into the allegations contained in the Scene article, which were made by 17 company employees and some three dozen Hispanics. At a news conference this week, Turner vowed to prosecute all violations of the law and “to put our own house in order.”

As initial targets, he named police officers Mann, Tim Mason, John Rex Lisle, and Jason Beddoe. Mann participated in some of the illegal activities of Detection Services, and other policemen were present at times, sources have told the Scene.

“If the investigation turns up evidence that they knew of any abuse, but failed to act, they will be dealt with harshly,” Turner said.

But this week, the Scene tells how the security guards got away with it for so long.

The Scene has learned that the department’s Internal Security Division already has been assigned to investigate Detection Services three times because of citizens’ complaints about the company or its guards. The first investigation, into the beating of Terry Smith, was whitewashed, sources say. Police claim the other two investigations are ongoing. But one of these probes has been cursory at best—Turner himself now admits that it “was not as thorough as it should have been”—and the other has been seriously compromised by an apparent leak of confidential information.

In the matter of the first investigation, the Scene has learned that after the beating at Nashboro Village, the security guards carefully coordinated their stories in statements to Internal Security, which then accepted their account of events virtually without question. One national law enforcement expert, who reviewed evidence in this case, concludes that the Internal Security investigation was “grossly deficient and extremely biased” and failed to follow widely accepted police procedures.