On May 24, 2023, Metro Nashville Police Department Chief of Police John Drake told members of Metro Council that he will soon be making a “great request” to the city for what will likely be tens of millions of public dollars to fund the construction of a brand new “state of the art” police training facility. Here are his remarks:
The forthcoming proposal to build a new cop academy is outrageous, and ultimately a danger to us all. Here’s why.
To begin with, MNPD currently has more than 100 funded but unfilled positions. The department has been unable to fill these positions for years. As new recruits join the force, many others leave it.
Meanwhile, as MNPD struggles to fill positions with public money they already have, fewer people are relying upon the police, as police “calls for service” continue to plummet year after year. Moreover, publicly available calls for service data show that the vast majority of MNPD’s work has minimal impact on real public safety, as a majority of all call “dispositions” are completely inconsequential. In addition to failing to provide genuine safety, the presence of MNPD violently exacerbates existing social and racial inequalities, making them a particular danger to Black, working class, and unhoused residents, and ultimately to everyone. If we expand the scope of “police training” by funding the construction of a “state of the art” training facility, we expand the likelihood that more of us will experience the violence that has been inherent to policing from its beginnings.
We have been told the lie again and again that more funding for more police is the only answer to the social problems we face in our communities. As a result, MNPD plans to open a new southeast precinct in late 2024, even though they do not have enough officers to staff it. The fruitless, dangerous expansion of police power in our city continues.
Despite their legacy of violence and their inherent incapacity to provide the safety we all deserve, as they struggle to keep and recruit officers, while racially disparate rates of police use of force skyrocket, and in the midst of ongoing revelations regarding the department’s unapologetic stance toward its sexually abusive culture, MNPD is preparing to demand more public money than ever before for a brand new police training facility that will not only fail to improve our lives, but endanger them.
Giving away tens of millions in public dollars for a new “state of the art” training academy endangers us all because it handcuffs us to a model of “public safety” that does not actually provide the safety we all deserve, the kind of safety that we can experience only if we DIVEST from the institutions that don’t keep us safe, and INVEST massively in the public goods and non-police violence prevention and crisis response that do. Simply put, funding a brand new “state of the art” cop academy will guarantee that Nashville remains a place of ever rising inequality, vulnerability, and violence for the foreseeable future, all while MNPD continues to proliferate the lie that our city will devolve into chaos without them.
We don’t have to buy into this myth. We don’t have to let ourselves be sacrificed in pursuit of the illusion of safety for all. With the people of Atlanta who are fighting the construction of a new police training academy in their city, and with others around the world, we believe that it is possible and necessary to build a world of safety and thriving beyond cops and cages. We deserve more safety than MNPD can ever give us. We deserve abundance, not crumbs. And so we say:
FUND OUR COMMUNITIES, NOT COP TRAINING ACADEMIES!
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The following is a transcript of Chief Drake’s key remarks regarding a new cop academy:
“As I mentioned a few moments ago, we are blessed in the Nashville Police Department to have extremely dedicated officers who care deeply for our city. The truth is, we need more.”
[…]
“We’re also looking in the future to build a police training academy. That’s gonna be a great request, but that will be for the next budget year. But if we’re gonna continue to grow our police department and have state of the art training, we’re gonna have to look to build a training academy in the future.”
[…]
Council Member Russ Pulley: “You said that we have a state of the art police department… Do we have state of the art training facilities to get our people through?”
Chief Drake: “That’s a great question and the answer is no, we don’t have a state of the art training facility. I visited NYPD and I got to see their campus. It looks like a university. Inside they had scenario rooms, they had an apartment complex, they had a grocery store, a bank, and other situations where they could conduct real life scenarios inside.”
[…]
Council Member Jennifer Gamble: “You mentioned that there’s a short-long-term plan to get a state of the art facility. Have you all done a cost analysis or a review of what can be done to the current facility to make some capital improvements at this time, and if so, what are those costs?”
Chief Drake: “So we have made some capital improvements. […] But I think it’s just too outdated to make any more improvements to it. It would have to be torn down. […] We haven’t had a cost analysis, but in my opinion I think it would have to be torn down, and so it’s just better to build a new one.”
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The full MNPD budget hearing held on May 24, 2023 can be viewed here.
Nashville People's Budget Coalition 
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