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The Metro Nashville Police Department headquarters on Murfressboro Pike. Credit: Martin B. Cherry / Nashville Banner
The Davidson County Grand Jury in recent months conducted its own inquiry into the whistleblower complaint brought last year against the Metro Nashville Police Department and concluded that “there is evidence of criminal and civil violations which should be meticulously investigated” by a special prosecutor, according to a forthcoming report obtained by the Banner.
The jury reviewed previous whistleblower complaints and heard testimony from current officers. The body also called retired MNPD veterans who have gone public with their experiences in recent years, including former detective Greta McClain, who founded the sexual assault survivors organization Silent No Longer Tennessee, and former Captain Dhana Jones, who was at one point the highest ranking Black woman in the department.
“We feel that these complaints coming from multiple sources and basically saying the same things are strong evidence of a serious problem within MNPD which is not being recognized or addressed,” the report reads.
Nearly a year ago, Mayor Freddie O’Connell brought in former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton to investigate the claims made in a 61-page complaint from former MNPD Lieutenant Garet Davidson, which included allegations that police officials worked with state Republican lawmakers to gut community oversight boards and routinely thwarted or eschewed accountability measures internally. But in the absence of any updates on that investigation, the grand jury’s report says the body “felt it was incumbent upon us as a grand jury to look into these allegations to see if there was merit.”
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The report also expresses concern about the revelation that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation raided the offices of Butler Snow, where Stanton is a partner, which came two days before the grand jury’s final meeting. Like the Community Review Board and the Banner, the grand jury has not gotten any clarity about the TBI’s actions. A letter from the jury to Stanton requesting an update received no response.
“At this point, we have no idea where that investigation stands and that is concerning.” the report reads.
The body’s foreperson for the first session of 2025 was Theeda Murphy, a longtime community organizer and avowed police-and-prison abolitionist. But she said the group wasn’t made in her image.
“We had a good cross section of people on that jury,” she told the Banner. “Everybody on that jury was not like me. Just regular folks.”
But by the end of the jury’s investigation into alleged misconduct inside MNPD, Murphy said they were all on the same page.
“There are deep, deep, deep problems within the Nashville police department that keep getting swept under the rug, that keep getting swept over,” she said of what they found.
One of the documents reviewed by the grand jury was an anonymous letter sent to Silent No Longer in 2020. The organization came forward that year with dozens of allegations of a toxic culture inside the MNPD where sexual misconduct and racial discrimination were either ignored or enabled with complainants being punished. Those claims, and others about the department’s allegedly warped disciplinary processes, were the subject of the WPLN investigative series “Behind the Blue Wall.” In September, the Banner reported about a case in which a former MNPD officer won a sexual harassment lawsuit against the department but saw only two of the accused officers face consequences, in the form of 1-2 lost vacation days, after internal investigations. In a deposition taken as part of that lawsuit, then-director of the Office of Professional Accountability Kathy Morante said the MNPD had investigated the Silent No Longer allegations and dismissed some of the more explosive claims as baseless. Morante was replaced as the OPA chief in the wake of the Davidson complaint last year.
Summarizing testimony from Jones, the former MNPD captain who retired after 28 years citing the department’s “toxic” culture, the grand jury report says that she “described how she had been discriminated and retaliated against when she fell out of favor for pushing for more resources and support for her department.” Jones, the report reads, “testified to a culture of favoritism and corruption within the department which mirrored the allegations of the Davidson complaint.”
The report also cites testimony from current MNPD officers that are in line with the picture painted by Davidson’s complaint. These officers, according to the report, testified about “incidents of supervisors interfering in Office of Professional Accountability investigations, policies and practices that artificially inflate call response times, and instances of retaliation against officers who fall out of favor with their supervisors.”
Murphy told the Banner she and the grand jury did not encounter any resistance during their own inquiry.
“The district attorney’s office and Judge [Khadija] Babb understand that the grand jury is independent and that our proceedings are secret,” she said. “They really did not know what we were doing, which is the way it’s supposed to be.”
Along with recommending that Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the MNPD, the report expressed support for the MNPD’s recent adoption of a more substantive sexual misconduct policy but said more should be done to get justice for past victims. The report also calls for more “supportive infrastructure” that would allow the grand jury “to act independently in an investigatory capacity.”
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Steven Hale is a staff reporter who covers criminal justice and public safety for the Banner. He worked as a reporter for The City Paper and Nashville Scene for 10 years. His work has also appeared in the Washington Post, The Appeal and The Daily Beast. His new book, "Death Row Welcomes You," was released on March 26.
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by Steven Hale, Nashville Banner
April 4, 2025
