@startleseasily is a fervent observer of the Metro government's comings and goings. In this column, "On First Reading," she'll recap the bimonthly Metro Council meetings and provide her analysis. You can find her in the pew in the corner by the mic, ready to give public comment on whichever items stir her passions. Follow her on Twitter here.
Holding laminated signs that read, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” protesters filled the first several rows of the gallery Tuesday night.
A group of police officers stood in the mezzanine, an unusually heightened presence for a run-of-the-mill Metro Council meeting.
“Mindful of the nature of the protests/discourse occurring over the past few weeks across the country concerning the Middle East, additional officers were in the area of Public Square only as a precaution,” writes Metro Nashville Police Department’s spokesperson, Don Aaron, in a statement to the Scene. “They were not needed.”
ISO First Amendment Rights
In 2017, protesters calling for justice for Jocques Clemmons — a Black man shot and killed by a white police officer in Nashville — shut down a Metro Council meeting. They were granted 20 minutes of public comment in response to their pleas to be heard.
Following the incident, then-vice mayor David Briley introduced a monthly public comment period to the council’s agenda. Under the rules, commenters were only allowed to address items not on the agenda.
Last year, the landscape for public comment changed. The Tennessee legislature passed a bill to require public comment periods during most meetings of local governmental bodies. As enacted, that bill requires that the public be allowed to comment on agenda items.
The council subsequently amended their rules of procedure to provide for public comment on agenda items only, a reversal of the previous guidelines.
In recent months, protesters calling for a cease-fire in Gaza have found increasingly creative ways to make their case in the context of legislation pending before the council. Vice Mayor Angie Henderson — who is responsible for ensuring that council meetings proceed in an orderly fashion — has had the unenviable task of determining when to cut commenters short for being off-topic or out of order, placing her in an adversarial position with members of the public.
Sensing the need for a change, Councilmember At-Large Delishia Porterfield proposed an amendment to the rules that would allow commenters to speak on any topic, regardless of whether it’s on the council’s agenda — essentially creating a hybrid of the old rule and the new rule.
While most councilmembers supported this change, some raised concerns about the potential for hate speech or incitements to violence. They pointed to a recent neo-Nazi march through downtown and antisemitic rhetoric as evidence that giving the public free rein in their comments might not end well. Council Director Margaret Darby warned, “Once we open up the forum to the speakers, then we would be hard-pressed to limit that speech.”
Members of the self-described “Common Sense Caucus” joined with the council’s conservative members to oppose the change, which passed with just enough votes to be adopted.
District 14 Councilmember Jordan Huffman, a Common Sense Caucus member, explains his “no” vote as a matter of precaution and sticking to the council’s area of influence. “I’m worried that we just opened the floodgates,” he says. “It is a very tense political climate right now. We just had Nazis in front of the courthouse.”
Huffman wishes the council had included some language prohibiting hate speech, but he acknowledges it wouldn’t be ideal to put the vice mayor in a position to judge what qualifies as hate speech.
“At the end of the day, it’s about staying on task,” Huffman says. “I just don’t want to give people false hope on something we can’t really do anything about.”
Do Not Pass Go
On the agenda Tuesday were two contracts that further solidify the privatization of our criminal legal system.
First was a three-year, $24 million contract with Rite of Passage for the management and operations of the Davidson County juvenile detention facility, aka kid jail. Rite of Passage describes its mission as “improving the lives of youth, families and communities.”
I can think of about a million ways an organization could improve the lives of youth, and none of them involve jail.
Let’s also take a moment to acknowledge how weird it is to choose the name “Rite of Passage.” It’s as though going to jail is some kind of coming-of-age ceremony, akin to a bar mitzvah or quinceañera.
Rite of Passage is currently contracted under a month-to-month extension of an emergency contract, instituted after the abrupt departure of previous provider, Youth Opportunity Investments, a company with a documented history of abuse and assaults.
A juvenile court audit this year found high-risk deficiencies in staffing and incident reporting. Rite of Passage has a rocky past: In 2018, Colorado terminated a contract with Rite of Passage after finding evidence that employees abused children and falsified reports. And just last year, an investigation uncovered multiple instances of sexual assault and improper isolation at a Rite of Passage-run facility in Arkansas.
In the Public Health and Safety Committee, a representative from the company chalked all this up to not having the right staff. “It wasn’t the practices,” he said, “as much as, staffing is everything.” To combat this, Rite of Passage is working to raise wages and intensify recruitment efforts.
Reports of abuse, assault and neglect of jailed children should tell us something about the types of people who want to be involved in juvenile detention. If it’s that difficult to recruit staff who won’t abuse the kids in their care, perhaps we should work on the system that leads us to incarcerate those kids in the first place.
Ultimately, the contract was approved on a vote of 23-3-4.
Do Not Collect $200
Next on the privatization docket was an amendment to increase the value of an existing contract with Bode Technology for testing of forensic biological evidence, like DNA. The amendment would take the contract value from $250,000 to $1 million.
A representative from the police department explained that the contract amendment would cover price increases in testing and allow the police to send more samples to Bode for faster processing than what the department is able to do in-house.
District 1 Councilmember Joy Smith Kimbrough — who admitted in committee that she hadn’t reviewed the contract — pushed for a deferral to better understand the scope and nature of the contract.
Councilmembers arguing against the deferral cited the need to close cases more quickly and apprehend criminals before they commit further crimes. They also reminded colleagues that forensic evidence can be used to exonerate people. To clear a growing backlog of testing, they argued, time is of the essence.
“This is not something we should be waiting on,” said District 27 Councilmember and former MNPD commander Bob Nash. “This is something we need to move forward on now.”
The council chose to defer the contract for one meeting.
