Nashville, 2 a.m.: Ridealong With Metro Police

The back seat of a police car is not built for comfort. It’s a cage with a plastic bench to sit on, a functional design that makes it easier to hose off when someone inevitably bleeds or throws up. 

But the view from back there is good. So that’s where Scene photographer Daniel Meigs sits, as I ride shotgun, inside Metro Police Officer Kelcey Bell’s squad car on a recent Wednesday, just after midnight. Working his shift from 10:30 p.m. to 7 a.m., he agreed to swing by the Central Precinct off Korean Veterans Boulevard to pick us up for a ridealong as he patrols his section of downtown. 

Almost immediately, a call comes in over the radio. Another officer is responding to a reported fight — a “10-57” — on Lower Broadway. We head that way as Bell explains the codes used to describe the relative urgency of a given situation. A Code 1 means get there when you can; a Code 2 means drive straight to the scene; and a Code 3 means hit the lights and sirens. 

By the time we’re getting out of the car so Bell’s fellow officer can fill him in on the situation, there is no situation. 

“Something like this, it’s more than likely a fight that’s already happened, and maybe a third party called it in and the people are already gone,” Bell says. “This is kind of typical for Broadway sometimes.”

We load into the car and pull back out onto the street. 

“That’s that on that one,” Bell says. “We’ll see if we can go get something else.” 

Bell, 31, joined the Metro force in 2013, and he’s been working this downtown midnight shift since 2014. His zone of the Central Precinct, 4-13, includes Nissan Stadium and the surrounding area and spreads north to parts of Germantown. He wheels the car back and forth around the area the way a castle guard might make a patrol on foot. The goal is for the regular presence of his squad car to deter crimes of opportunity — Bell’s zone includes lots of industrial areas and businesses, and much of his work is responding to break-ins. There are the occasional false alarms.

“We’ll get a lot of burglary alarms at places where someone accidentally set it off or a rat or something like that set off the motion sensor,” he says.

As he patrols, Bell checks in on particular areas that are ripe for criminal activity — a dark brickyard, a construction site and a parking lot by the river, where drag-racing crews gather on occasion. As we chat, he notices something out of place in a parking lot.

“There’s usually some cars up here, but there’s one up here that I haven’t seen before,” he says. “This little Jaguar.”

He pulls into the parking lot, aims his spotlight at the car and goes to check it out, radioing in the license plate as he does a lap around the car with his flashlight. 

“Well that thing is gutted,” he says. “No speakers, the radio and stuff is gone.”

But it’s parked on private property and there’s no sign of a break-in. It hasn’t been reported stolen, either, so we move on. 

Friday and Saturday nights are when things get busy for Central Precinct officers, but the couple of hours we spend with him on this weeknight are relatively calm.

“It is a quiet night tonight,” Bell says. “I’m surprised we haven’t gotten at least some people fighting or a loud noise call at a hotel.

A quiet night — “which is not a bad thing, at all,” he says. “Not a bad thing.”

But later, Bell will have reason to jump on the accelerator. We’re back on Broadway when he suddenly pulls a quick U-turn, flips on the lights and guns it, catching up to a car that quickly pulls over on a side road. Bell issues a warning. He had seen them swerving over into the oncoming lane and stopped them to check things out. 

When he’s back in the car he asks if we’d seen what prompted him to make the stop.

No, we confess, we did not.

He smiles.

“You gotta be watching.”