Metropolitik is a recurring column featuring the Scene’s analysis of Metro dealings.
Despite what you may hear on the campaign trail or see on the evening news, Nashville has been getting gradually safer over the past few decades. Violent crime in Nashville is down — way down — from its highs in the early 1990s. But North Nashville — the historic epicenter of the city’s Black community, ravaged by segregation, city disinvestment and, more recently, gentrification and displacement — continues to suffer from the city’s highest rates of violence. Years after 37208 was named the nation’s most-incarcerated ZIP code, gun deaths and violent crime still burden the tapestry of neighborhoods.
Through generations of systemic headwinds, North Nashville has built a commitment to community-based solutions. Rasheedat Fetuga formed activist organization Gideon’s Army for the neighborhood’s children. When she was a teacher at Carter Lawrence Elementary in the early 2000s, a student, Lamar Hughes, came to see her after being kicked out of class.
“Ms. Fetuga, I just don’t know why I should keep trying,” Fetuga remembers him telling her. “Look at my life. I’m not gonna live to see 18.”
“He told me that,” Fetuga tells the Scene. “At 9 years old.”
Hughes was shot and killed in Edgehill in 2010. Months after his death, he was remembered in a vigil along with fellow Hillsboro High School students Michael Walker Jr., also a victim of gun violence, and Damon Donelson, who was hit by a car. All had died that fall. At the vigil, family and friends were still asking for witnesses to come forward. No arrests had been made.
Fetuga turned Hughes’ memory into an effort to address endemic community violence. In 2017, Gideon’s Army brought in Cure Violence, a Chicago-based organization that runs anti-violence trainings to skill up members. They held events in the community, delivered direct services to families and were hired for contract work in Metro Nashville Public Schools, where Fetuga has worked on and off since 2000, most recently running restorative justice programs at Pearl-Cohn High School.
According to Fetuga, violence in North Nashville is neither structured nor random.
“Nashville is just different,” she says. “There are gangs, cliques, sets and groups, but no structure. Violence in North Nashville is interpersonal, and it’s all caused by poverty and a lack of resources. It’s caused by the criminalization of people who are living in these conditions.”
For a decade, Gideon’s Army has been trying to understand how and why violence happens and keep it from happening further, all without relying on traditional policing, courts or prisons. The group’s 2016 “Driving While Black” report documented racial bias in Nashville traffic stops, and members helped organize a community response to the police killings of Jocques Clemmons in 2017 and Daniel Hambrick in 2018. The group trained and hired violence interrupters to identify and mediate community conflict and serve as alternatives to a traditional police presence, considered dangerous in itself by many residents of North Nashville. After national scrutiny of violent policing in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the group emerged as a rare local authority on alternatives to traditional law enforcement.
That logic has now been adopted by top brass in the Metro Nashville Police Department. “We can’t arrest our way out of this,” Chief John Drake recently told a packed room on the eighth floor of 505 Church St., a new high-rise developed by real estate mogul Tony Giarratana. Ron Johnson, the city’s community safety director, invited media to the Feb. 15 roundtable with visiting consultants from the National Network for Safe Communities. Drake was joined at the table by Mayor John Cooper, Juvenile Court Judge Sheila Calloway, District Attorney Glenn Funk, the Community Foundation’s Hal Cato and others. They discussed collaboration between the city, police, businesses and the community, all agreeing that the city had to look beyond traditional law and order. Johnson’s work focuses on a coalition, called The Village, that claims hundreds of individuals and organizations as members, including Gideon’s Army.
In November, the city split a $1.5 million grant between Gideon’s Army and Why We Can’t Wait, a community organization working in the Napier-Sudekum Homes in South Nashville. NewsChannel 5’s Phil Williams was quick to cover the grant, pointing out that the city had not “questioned Gideon’s Army” about “the involvement of its own people in acts of violence.” When reached by the Scene, Williams declined to comment for this story.
The piece capped a long string of reporting by Williams, who clocked 18 stories about Gideon’s Army over 14 months. NewsChannel 5 has a dedicated “Gideon’s Army” web tab, where it has churned out far-ranging reports contrasting Gideon’s Army’s mission to reduce violence with the personal lives of its members, scrutinizing the organization for working with individuals who own weapons or are tied to illegal activity. Williams operates at one speed, with a trademark doggedness that has helped him break big stories about government officials and civic scandals. When applied to a small nonprofit experimenting with alternatives to policing in an attempt to end violence, Williams’ desire for a juicy angle comes off to some as a clumsy misunderstanding of Gideon’s Army and its mission, burying North Nashville’s existing anti-violence efforts just as the city was turning its attention to policing alternatives.
Maintaining relationships with people close to patterns of violence, termed “credible messengers,” has become widely accepted by civic and law enforcement leaders as a tool for building community safety. MNPD first contacted Gideon’s Army about working with Cleveland Shaw Jr., a resident of MDHA’s Cumberland View Apartments later hired by Gideon’s Army on a contract basis to plan events and build community. After he was shot and killed in 2021, Shaw became a central focus for Williams because of his ties to drug dealing and guns. Individuals’ proximity to coexisting indicators of violence — drugs, weapons, concentrated poverty — comes with relationships, knowledge, trust and networks that qualify them to prevent its spread. It’s what the city required of Gideon’s Army when it issued its 2022 grant and in line with the prevailing logic for identifying and reducing violent crime in communities.
With recent funding from the city, Gideon’s Army will continue its violence interruption program in conjunction with the Metro Department of Health. Meanwhile, the city has bulked up police hiring as it prepares for a new downtown substation slated for 2024. Updated training for 911 operators will help emergency services take advantage of new Partners in Care and REACH non-police emergency response initiatives — a critical need that became more apparent last month when MNPD Officer Dylan Ramos killed an armed man on Buchanan Street who was, according to 911 callers, suffering from mental illness. The stakes remain high, with violence constantly threatening schools, streets and neighborhoods.
“North Nashville is on fire,” Fetuga tells the Scene. “It’s a burning house, and there are children inside, and we are running into that building with the supplies that we have and bringing out children who are burned. Some don’t make it. We get burned. It’s traumatic work. There are people who want to sit on the sidelines and complain about how we’re doing it or that we’re not good enough — but we are out here. You can’t save children by having meetings. You do the work and you feel the pain when things go wrong. But you don’t quit.”
