Metro councilmembers held a joint committee meeting Tuesday to hear from police, the Community Oversight Board, community members, and the offices of District Attorney Glenn Funk and Public Defender Martesha Johnson about the city’s implementation of automated license plate readers. After an hour of presentations, the body — a combination of the council’s Public Health and Safety and Transportation and Infrastructure committees, overseen by chairs Russ Pulley and Jeff Syracuse — voted to defer each committee’s review of the pilot program, moving discussion to Aug. 15. Following a rocky start in January, in which police posted cameras without proper initial signage and briefly suspended the program, the city’s six-month LPR pilot ended on July 22.
The vote to approve license plate readers for Nashville police passed a split council in December with an asterisk: A network of automatic scanners would come slowly and cautiously. The six-month pilot program would be highly vetted and strapped with safeguards, boosters assured their colleagues, assuaging worries about giving carte blanche to law enforcement that could increase traffic stops and turbocharge overpolicing. Prior to approval, councilmembers repeatedly raised flags about creating a vast sea of data overseen by police and potentially shared with state and federal law enforcement, specifically Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Six months later, information from the program paints a picture of a vast, opaque net of data collection that has produced few results for law enforcement. More than 71 million license plates scanned produced just 1,316 verified hits for police — tag numbers that were visually confirmed by two MNPD officers and returned positive hits when checked with the National Crime Information Center, a centralized database maintained by state and federal law enforcement. Verified hits, which allow an officer to be dispatched, yielded no arrest for MNPD more than 95 percent of the time. About 6 percent of the time, a verified hit enabled MNPD to recover a vehicle. These hits also led to at least 16 vehicle stops and seven searches that did not result in an arrest. Police did not share information about who owns or can access the city’s LPR data, or its camera contracts with private operators like Motorola or Flock Safety, two confirmed LPR vendors. The ordinance approving the LPR pilot stipulates that Metro police report to the council on how LPR data is shared and accessed. Police did not address whether MNPD had received or complied with data requests from other agencies, like the FBI or ICE.
Despite LPRs producing no results for officers an overwhelming majority of the time, MNPD Officer Gregory Blair argued that the few examples of criminal apprehension justify an expanded full implementation of the program. He also pointed out the challenges of responding to a hit on a moving vehicle, which could slip the city’s surveillance network in the time it takes to verify the plate and dispatch an officer. He did not address the 1,253 instances in which a hit was verified, possibly dispatching an officer in pursuit of a vehicle or prompting a vehicle stop, and did not result in an arrest.
Blair, the city’s deputy chief for Crime Control Strategies, defended LPR statistics as precision policing in his presentation to the council.
“Does it work? Yes, it’s helped out,” Blair told councilmembers. “It’s very beneficial. Did we manage the program well? Yes we did. To my knowledge, there’s been no complaints, and it’s been a very successful pilot program.”
On Tuesday, Blair told the body that LPRs had led to 112 arrests. On Wednesday morning, MNPD’s dashboard reported that LPRs had instead led to 63 arrests.
License plate reader installed on Broadway
The Community Oversight Board’s executive director Jill Fitcheard and data analyst Dylan DePriest followed with a similar presentation. Fitcheard pointed out that the COB had received extensive feedback from Nashvillians.
“People are concerned about the overall use of LPRs and their placement in low-income, non-white areas of the city,” said Fitcheard. “They are concerned about Nashville becoming a surveillance city, specifically one where the racial and social economic disparities of our criminal justice system are exaggerated by technology.”
DePriest presented maps of LPR cameras and LPR-related traffic stops, demonstrating that the technology has led to a concentration of stops in low-income areas. DePriest's presentation showed that cameras at two intersections — Trinity Lane and Dickerson Pike, and Gallatin Pike and Old Hickory — made up the lion’s share of stops, arrests and vehicle recoveries. Black individuals were disproportionately represented in LPR-related arrests and use-of-force incidents involving an officer. Unhoused individuals made up 8.57 percent of arrests, 40 times their representation in Nashville’s population as a whole.
“Since the publication of 'Driving While Black' in 2016, MNPD has fundamentally changed how they conduct general vehicle stops, reducing the amount of stops against Black individuals, which used to be higher than their population percentage in Nashville,” DePriest explained. “It appears that LPR-initiated stops do not follow the same improvements.”
Councilmembers agreed that the body needs more time to hear from the community and analyze the results of the pilot before considering full LPR implementation.
“I would also like to consider the fact that we’re in an election season,” said councilmember at-large Sharon Hurt. “When we defer this, it’s going to be up to a new council. I think they should be the ones to vet this more.”
