The Metro Nashville Community Oversight Board (COB) was created through the dedicated organizing efforts of Nashville residents. In January of 2018, the Metro Council voted against a public hearing on creating a police oversight board. Undeterred, Community Oversight Now, the coalition advocating for the COB, decided on April 4th, 2018—the 50th observance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death—to bring the issue directly to Nashville voters as a Metro Charter Amendment.
The Metro Charter Amendment specified the structure of the COB, the minimum staff that would be hired to support the board, and a minimum budget amount. To put the amendment on the ballot, Community Oversight Now and other supportive organizations in Nashville collected 8,269 signatures from Nashville voters. Nashville voters ratified Amendment 1 on November 6, 2018 with 59% of voters in favor and 41% opposed—134,371 votes to 94,129. The Board is comprised of 11 members: seven nominated by community organizations or private petitions of at least 50 residents; two nominated by city council; and two nominated by the Mayor. The Board is supported by a staff of employees of the Metro Nashville government, including an Executive Director, an Assistant Director, a Legal Advisor, Research Analysts, Investigators, a Community Liaison, a Social Worker, and an Administrative Assistant.
The Board has the power to investigate allegations that Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) officers have committed misconduct against members of the public, as well as issue policy advisory reports making recommendations to agencies involved in the Davidson County criminal justice system. The Board also has the option of establishing a monitoring program that provides an ongoing review or audit of the complaint process administered by the MNPD Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) or equivalent internal affairs program in MNPD. Based on the factual findings of COB investigations, the Board may recommend that discipline be given within the parameters of civil service rules and regulations and, when appropriate, refer criminal misconduct and civil rights violations to the District Attorney, Grand Jury, or U.S. Attorney. MNPD must respond to disciplinary recommendations in writing.
Background:
News reports both locally and nationally, in addition to personal experiences and complaints shared with the Metro Nashville Community Oversight Board (COB) have highlighted that there has been an increase in response times from police when people make a 911 call. Long response times create a twofold issue: first of public perception (i.e., the general public not believing that police will respond promptly), and second from a safety perspective in that certain call types demand quick response times in the interest of public safety. Recognizing the importance of this issue, earlier this year the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) transitioned officer schedules from five 8.5 hour shifts per week to four 10.5-hour shifts, in part because the Department believed this would “enable officers to get to citizen calls more quickly”.
There are a number of factors beyond scheduling that may influence call response time, however. For instance, multiple studies indicate that ecological factors can influence response time: police response time shortens in neighborhoods with high levels of “concentrated disadvantage”, immigrant populations, and non- white residents. There is also an empirically supported relationship between call severity and response time, such that as perceived call severity increases, response time decreases. Organizational factors are important as well. Perhaps the most obvious explanation for increasing call times would be a lack of police staffing to respond to emergency calls. Indeed, this common sense notion has empirical support: as the officer staffing rate of a police department increases, response time generally decreases.
In terms of impact, there is empirical debate regarding whether increasing call response times has any substantive effect on crime outcomes such as arrest, deterrence, or other such metrics. On the one hand, research from the prevailing school of thought suggests that “[the theory that] rapid response has no meaningful effect on crime clearance rates is one of the most well-established paradigms in the criminology literature”. Put more simply, criminologists have long believed that response time is largely irrelevant to solving crime. On the other hand, newer research suggests that faster response times can have a statistically significant effect on clearing a crime by arrest. Debate on this topic is very much ongoing, and research has yet to point clearly in one direction or another.
Regardless of whether increasing call times has any impact on crime, there is an important effect on community perception. Research has demonstrated that police response times to calls for service serves as the measure by which much of the population judges the effectiveness and legitimacy of the police. Even older studies which cast doubt on the capacity for quicker response times to reduce crime have acknowledged that response time significantly impacts public satisfaction with police. Overall, this creates cause for concern in Nashville. Mirroring an increasingly common national phenomenon, Nashville is losing sworn officers even as its population climbs or holds steady, thereby lowering the number of per capita officers for the city. While these declines are noteworthy and deserve attention, they are such that the number of sworn officers per 10,000 citizens has decreased by less than one over the last five years. While this decrease in available staffing almost certainly plays a part in the increase in call times, it seems unlikely to tell the whole story. There are also other stakeholders, including the Department of Emergency Communication, who likely play a role in this process. With emergency communication agencies being the epicenter of police calls for service, we want to get a better understanding on the call prioritization process, and if their process has a significant impact (burdensome or otherwise) on how officers respond, and to determine if the relationship between the two agencies can have measurable outcomes in how calls are resolved. All told, the holistic system of call prioritization and officer dispatch is not yet well understood by the general public in Nashville.
Nashville Context:
It’s clear that response times are a national issue, but the below section aims to localize the problem. MNPD’s call response time for all call types has increased since 2018, though this effect is most dramatic for routine and urgent calls as compared to emergency calls:
• Response time for emergency calls (Code 3) has increased from a low of 10.7 mins in 2020 to a high of
• 14.9 in 2022.
• Response time for urgent calls (Code 2) has increased from a low of 37.3 mins in 2018 to a high of 64.0 in 2022.
• Response time for routine calls (Code 1) has increased from a low of 66.3 mins in 2020 to 128.1 in 2022.
There are a number of other factors to unpack, including:
• While officer travel time has increased slightly since 2020, the increase in overall call response time is driven by a caller’s average time in queue. This increase could be driven both by slower response times by EMS dispatch and by longer response times from MNPD officers available to respond to a call.
• Response times for all violent calls have seen increases over the last three years, though shootings have seen the most dramatic increase in response times, predominantly from 2021-22.
• Response time for all traffic calls has increased, though response time for vehicles blocking the right of way has increased the most dramatically, almost doubling from 2020 to 2022.
• Response time for all property calls has increased, though response time for thefts has increased the most dramatically, nearly doubling from 2020 to 2022.
• Calls for disorder or missing persons have all shown fairly comparable increases in response time over the last three years.
• While all non-criminal calls have seen an average increase in call response time, response times requesting an officer for an investigation have increased the most steeply over the last several years.
• All calls for mental health and substance use have seen sharp increases in response times.
Conclusion:
Per the Mayor’s FY23 Recommended Budget, MNPD was ‘On Track’ with its goal of a response time below six minutes for Code 3 Emergency calls. It is unclear how the Mayor and/or MNPD came to this conclusion given that their publicly available data clearly outlines that the average response time to a Code 3 call was 10.7 minutes in 2020, 12.5 minutes in 2021, and 14.9 minutes in 2022 YTD14. Even removing 2022 from our analysis suggests a trend in the wrong direction for achieving that six-minute goal, not ‘On Track’ as suggested. Further, per an appendix to that same FY23 budget, in FY21, the Mayor reports that average receive to arrive time for an urgent call with emergency equipment was 10.9 minutes; the average receive to arrive time for an urgent call without emergency equipment was 43.2 minutes; and the average routine call took 77.9 minutes from call receipt to arrival.
It is clear from these numbers that there is some confusion regarding the performance metrics and benchmarks set for call response times. This leaves us with a number of outstanding questions regarding: a) EMS call structure, b) performance goals and the department’s achievement of such goals, c) MNPD officer’s system for call prioritization, and d) community perception of whether their needs are being met by MNPD and Nashville’s Department of Emergency Communications (DEC). Further exploring these areas may provide satisfactory explanations for the phenomenon, but one thing is clear: MNPD’s response times for almost all call types are increasing at a rapid rate, which has important public safety implications for the city. It is worth noting that research has shown that concentrated hot-spot style policing can be effective in reducing call response times, enabling police to respond quickly and efficiently to high-demand areas. This same research showed that call type could be an important factor impacting police response time, and encouraged future study to unpack this relationship.
Given the wide scope of this issue, it would be impossible for one student to tackle everything outlined in this proposal. We are open to having a team of students or a single student who selects just one aspect of the proposal to address. (The two interconnected areas that are highest priority to investigate would be the MNPD's system of call priorization and how that intertwines with the role/duties of the DEC. We suspect the incredibly long wait times have something to do with how the two agencies interact.)
The final deliverable will be a Policy Advisory Report. (Some examples would be this and this.)
The student(s) would follow the steps below:
1. Develop a research proposal to be presented to the Community Oversight Board at one of its monthly Board Meetings (typically the 4th Wednesday of the month). The proposal will include an overview, primary research questions, a brief background of the topic, research methods, data required, a list of relevant stakeholders, an implementation timeline, and an impact and risk assessment. This document is meant to inform the Board about the topic and give enough information so that they may make an informed decision of whether to approve the project. The Board will then vote to approve the research proposal. (There is a very slim possibility that the proposal itself be rejected. Historically, proposals have never received anything but unanimous approval, and the project sponsor will work closely to review the proposal in advance so that the product they submit will meet the approval standards.) At that point, research can commence. If approved, then:
2. Weekly or biweekly research reviews with the Lead Research Analyst (the site contact), and montly research reviews with the Executive Director to shape the direction of the research
3. Draft report to be reviewed by Metro Nashville Community Oversight staff. If approved, then:
4. Draft report released to Community Oversight Board at its monthly meeting. Board then votes on whether to release the report for public comment, or if it needs modification. If approved, then:
5. Public Comment meeting to solicit public feedback on the draft report.
6. Final version of the report again presented to the Community Oversight Board at one of its monthly meetings. If approved, then release final version to the public.
As outlined in the 'Deliverables' section, this will require presentations at four separate Board meetings. These presentations can be virtual, though in-person attendance would be optimal.
The nature of these meetings are such that they cannot be completed in a timeframe of less than three months, and likely more than that. Timelines should be discussed with staff to ensure capstone deadlines can be met.
