This story is a partnership between the Nashville Banner and the Nashville Scene. The Nashville Banner is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization focused on civic news. Visit nashvillebanner.com for more information.
Homicides in Nashville have dropped by more than 25 percent compared to this time last year, following a national trend that shows violent crime rates falling after record surges during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In his annual State of Metro Address on Tuesday, Mayor Freddie O’Connell touted the significant drop in homicides along with robberies, aggravated assaults and gun thefts from vehicles. He pointed to the numbers as evidence of the success of recent efforts by his administration and the Metro Nashville Police Department.
“We’ve revised our overall approach to public safety, adding community-based safety programs and refining traditional policing programs, and it’s working,” O’Connell said.
It’s unclear, though, what community-based safety programs added by the administration are actively working on the ground right now.
In October last year, the mayor’s office was awarded a nearly $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to develop a “Community Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative,” which will be overseen by the Metro Public Health Department. Matthew Peters, the health department’s spokesperson, tells the Nashville Banner that four hires have been made for the program in the past month — a case manager and three “credible messengers” envisioned to be people “with lived experiences in overcoming violence.” The new staffers are still in the onboarding process, Peters says.
O’Connell spokesperson Alex Apple says the mayor is also considering hiring a “community safety liaison” who would work either in the mayor’s office or Metro Public Health. He says this role would likely focus on gun violence, which the O’Connell administration is seeking to approach as a public health problem.
As for “refining traditional policing programs,” the MNPD created a Crime Control Strategies Bureau in 2022. The new office analyzes “crime trends across Davidson County and [develops] strategies addressing crime and preventing future crimes.” Among the strategies overseen by that office was a pilot program for license plate readers, which will soon be installed all across the city, despite ongoing community pushback.
But Nashville is just one of many cities across the country that saw an alarming rise in killings in 2020 and are now seeing that tide recede.
From 2019 to 2020, the U.S. homicide rate rose by 30 percent, the largest single-year increase in modern American history. In Nashville from 1963 through 2019, there were only four years in which police recorded more than 100 homicides, the most recent of which was 2017. But starting with the pandemic year of 2020 — which saw a record-setting 114 homicides — the city surpassed that threshold three years in a row.
But MNPD data shows that killings have been slowing in Nashville since the midpoint of last year. As of May 1, 2024 there had been 29 homicides in the city compared to 39 by that point last year, accounting for the 25.6 percent drop O’Connell cited in his speech. (As of this writing, MNPD has recorded 32 homicides so far this year, compared to 44 in 2023, which slightly increases the year-to-date drop.) Through this week, homicide rates so far this year have fallen by nearly 20 percent nationally, as well, according to a collection of data from the criminal justice consulting firm AH Datalytics.
For Andrew Krinks, a Nashville-based community organizer focused on a wide range of social justice issues, including policing, that’s reason for skepticism that such changes can be attributed to local law enforcement efforts.
“If there’s a claim being made that Nashville police, for instance, have done an exceptional job over the course of three or four months, then I would want to go deeper on that,” he tells the Banner. “For one thing, I’m seeing that the homicide rate is declining everywhere. It wouldn’t be the case that suddenly all police departments got on the same page and cracked the code on how to lower homicides.”
Krinks says the oft-assumed correlation between policing and crime rates is a false one. He cited the work of the late David Bayley, a prominent policing scholar who famously wrote that the “best kept secret in modern life” is that “the police do not prevent crime.”
AH Datalytics co-founder and crime analyst Jeff Asher told NPR earlier this year that the question of why crime rates go down is a difficult one to answer, noting that “criminologists still aren’t sure why violent crime went down in the ’90s.” He suggested that there are likely many factors, and local explanations for a national trend are unpersuasive.
“The national explanations — the big explanations — are going to be a lot more compelling than, ‘Our department did patrols on every other Thursday, and that’s why we think it declines,’” he told All Things Considered host Ari Shapiro.
Asked about the potential impact of MNPD’s Crime Control Strategies Bureau, Theeda Murphy — who was at the forefront of local activism related to police shootings and civilian oversight of the police — was incredulous.
“Something I’ve never heard of before has supposedly made all these big changes, and that’s the primary driver of change?” she says. “I don’t know.”
In the interview with Asher on NPR, Shapiro noted that violent crime is also down in cities where local police departments are understaffed, further complicating the picture. Still, law enforcement officials have long argued they could do more to prevent and solve crimes with more people on the force.
Last year, Metro Police Chief John Drake said the MNPD was short 170 officers. And in his speech Tuesday, the mayor said Nashville is “on pace — for the first time in years — to have the police department fully staffed by the end of this year.” Fully staffing the MNPD was a campaign promise made by O’Connell, along with most other 2023 mayoral candidates.
The mayor also announced that “there have been 127 new hires at our Department of Emergency Communications in the last 15 months, and the DEC is now in compliance with national call answering standards for emergency and non-emergency calls for the first time in department history.”
Another critical data point regarding crime and policing is the clearance rate — that is, the percentage of cases in which police arrest an alleged perpetrator. For homicides, national clearance rates have hovered around 50 percent, with lower rates for violent crime as a whole, meaning that the majority of violent crimes go unsolved. In Nashville, of the 29 homicides recorded through April, there are 12 — more than 40 percent — for which no one has yet been arrested.
