Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall knows that the process of replacing a police chief is often fraught with challenges. A change in police leadership many times follows periods of strife, and decisions over the future of the department can divide officials and communities.
The sheriff’s late father, Durward Hall, was a Metro Councilmember in 1989 when then-Mayor Bill Boner faced a choice between two veteran internal candidates for the job — Robert Kirchner and John Ross. The elder Hall sided with his longtime friend, Kirchner, when the council weighed in on the matter, which had divided Metro insiders. Boner named Kirchner the chief and appointed Ross deputy chief. (Almost three years later, just before New Year’s Day 1992, Ross drove out to the police training academy and killed himself with his service revolver. He left a note citing health, financial and marital problems.)
When Kirchner retired in 1995, Emmett Turner was appointed as the city’s first Black police chief. He took over a department divided along racial lines. In 1992, a Black undercover officer named Reginald Miller had been beaten by two white officers from the same precinct. The incident came around the same time that Black officers were alleging discrimination within the department related to promotions, among other things.
Turner led the department until 2003, when he left for a job with the state — kicking off another round of jockeying and internal drama. Then-Mayor Bill Purcell appointed Deborah Faulkner as acting chief. Faulkner was the first woman to work as a uniformed patrol officer in the department’s history, and the first to achieve the rank of deputy chief. She looked at first like a shoe-in for the permanent job, but she faced criticism over the department’s handling of the investigation into the widely reported disappearance of 13-year-old Tabitha Tuders as well as dissent from within the department. In late 2003, as decision time neared for Purcell, a veteran deputy chief wrote a memo harshly criticizing Faulkner for not doing enough to address the overwhelming whiteness of the department’s leadership ranks. That deputy chief’s name was Steve Anderson.
Purcell ultimately hired Ronal Serpas, and Faulkner resigned. When Serpas was hired away by New Orleans in 2010, Anderson was appointed to replace him. In August of this year, Anderson abruptly retired from the Metro Nashville Police Department, with the city and the police force still beset by the issues that his predecessors failed to address. The department’s relationship with Black Nashvillians is broken after years of disproportionate attention, measured in stops and searches, and two recent fatal police shootings of Black men. There is still a lack of racial and gender diversity among the department’s leadership, and the sexual assault survivors organization Silent No Longer Tennessee has recently come forward with what it says are allegations from dozens of women of harassment, assault and sexist treatment within the department.
“It’s always been a complicated process,” Hall says of selecting a police chief.
Hall is one of six people who will serve on an interview panel that will meet with five finalists for the job on Oct. 29 and 30. Along with the sheriff, the panel includes: American Baptist College president Dr. Forrest Harris; Community Oversight Board chair Andrés Martinez; Former Boston police commissioner and Seattle police Chief Kathleen O’Toole; president and chief executive officer of the YWCA Sharon Roberson; and Metro’s chief of operations and performance Kristin Canavan Wilson. Mayor John Cooper will make the final decision.
Hall says he hasn’t spoken to the mayor about the search at all, which he appreciates.
“I kind of find that somewhat refreshing,” says Hall, who expressed an interest early on in participating in the process. “They’re not telling me what to do and who they want, that type of thing. There’s been no pressure at all or even interest at all in talking about it, which I think is a healthy way of doing it.”
The search has also attracted attention for the voices that have been left out of it. A search review committee put together by the mayor was made up entirely of former cops and prosecutors. Metro Public Defender Martesha Johnson has not been included in the process at all.
“I certainly think that as the agency that represents most of the people who interact with the police department,” says Johnson, “I thought that my perspective and certainly the ability to ask questions from the perspective of the work that we do was important.”
Johnson tells the Scene she understands that she doesn’t have “an automatic right” to participate in the mayor’s hiring of a police chief, but she has expressed her views to his office.
“I would like a police chief … who understands that there are multiple perspectives as it relates to interactions with the police, and the perspective of someone charged with a crime is as important as other people involved in that process,” she says. “It is sometimes difficult to get people to listen to that viewpoint, but it is certainly hard to hear that perspective if the perspective is not in the room.”
A new chief, Johnson adds, “should be engaged in efforts to try and bring more restorative practices to the city, more diversion opportunities for people who struggle with mental illness and addiction.”
That’s what Hall wants to see too, and it’s something he plans to ask the candidates about. He calls Anderson a friend who brought a number of “healthy” attributes to the job, but says the former chief “is not the easiest to get to change or to be creative and think outside the box.” Nashville, Hall says, has made a big investment in decriminalizing mental illness with its newly opened Behavioral Care Center, and he wants a chief who is committed to putting it to use.
“We need a person in that job who’s at least willing to see that if you arrest a naked man in the airport because you were called out there,” says Hall, “that the police chief and the police department is willing to see an alternative if it’s available in lieu of just more arrests and more people going in the system.”
