Report: Toxic culture allowed sexual misconduct to permeate the Nashville police department
A once-obscure advocacy group has amplified individual allegations of sexual misconduct within the Nashville police department, leading to a groundswell of outrage and three investigations into the agency and its culture.
The parallel investigations bring added scrutiny to a department already facing accusations of systemic racism and raise new questions about the agency’s slate of mostly male leadership.
Silent No Longer Tennessee said it surveyed 10 current and former police employees earlier this year, spoke to an undisclosed number of women and logged two allegations of sexual assault. At least two women described incidents of sexual harassment.
In a report shared with journalists earlier this month, the group said its survey and interviews pointed to five department leaders, including former Chief Steve Anderson, who had created a toxic culture that allowed harassment and misconduct to permeate the ranks.
Allegations were emailed to Mayor John Cooper and the police department in April, but the mayor didn’t publicly address the matter until the group’s leader, former police detective Greta McClain, shared her findings with reporters this month.
On Aug. 8, Cooper said he hadn’t seen much about the allegations. But on Aug. 10, after reviewing the report and other details McClain provided, Cooper said they were troubling and called for an investigation by the district attorney and the city’s human resources department.
District Attorney Glenn Funk asked the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to conduct a criminal investigation, and an internal police review is ongoing.
Council members who reviewed the details made their own calls for thorough investigations into the department. At-large council member Bob Mendes said “the volume of people” included in Silent No Longer documents underscored the need for a wide-ranging inquiry.
“If it’s one or two people, maybe there’s room for it to be a fluke,” Mendes said. “With this number of people complaining, it definitely warrants attention.”
Interim police Chief John Drake, who replaced Anderson this month, joined in the call for a TBI investigation into an allegation of a 2016 sexual assault, involving Capt. Jason Reinbold and a female officer. But the investigation also will include additional claims contained in documents provided to the city by Silent No Longer.
McClain said the group was not able to verify all of the allegations she put forward, but said she shared them publicly so they could be investigated.
The documents, some of which are heavily redacted or vague, describe a culture that does not aggressively address sexual misconduct allegations.
Police said internal investigators started reviewing documents from the advocacy group and asked for more “substantive information.”
“I want to be clear that I and the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department have absolutely no tolerance for sexual harassment or sexual misconduct,” Drake said last Tuesday in a statement. “Any allegation of that nature against any police department employee will be taken very seriously and investigated.”
McClain said additional employees have come forward to share stories of sexual misconduct since her report attracted media attention this month.