Metro Nashville Council during a 2023 meeting. (Photo: John Partipilo)
Who doesn’t love a good political argument: a spirited volley of views on an issue that matters, with changeable minds and real consequences at stake. But a good argument requires good arguments — meaningful claims having logical integrity and supporting evidence. Too often we see the former without the latter. Case in point: the lively skirmish over police surveillance that recently played out in Nashville’s Metro Council.
The Council was weighing (and ultimately voted down) a proposal to expand the city police department’s use of surveillance technology called Axon Fusus. MNPD already contracts with Axon for a piece of Fusus that lets residents and private businesses voluntarily register the existence of their security cameras, streamlining police’s ability to request video footage for a police investigation. The expansion would add technology that lets police access participating camera livestreams on the fly — what Axon calls a “real time crime center.”
The Council’s debate on Tuesday, Dec. 3, leading up to the vote felt constructive in tone and tenor, but after taking in all 85 minutes of it, I found myself depressed about the skimpiness of the arguments on both sides.
Arguments in favor of Fusus expansion were inevitably handicapped by a lack of evidence for the effectiveness of these “real time crime centers.” Axon has versions of this tech up and running in dozens of municipalities, but the company relies mainly on anecdotes to sell the thing and has declined journalists’ requests for specifics about how it measures efficacy.
As a result, supporters could only assert without evidence, as Councilmember Sheri Weiner did, that the system will “speed up apprehensions.” Enthusiasts wish us to imagine real-time digital hot pursuits of fleeing criminals — like British TV detectives use to pinch bad guys in CCTV-happy London — but conjecture isn’t much of an argument.
Opting for a fear appeal, others in support cited statistics on crimes that are up in Nashville, as Councilmember David Benton did, concluding “we failed our citizens trying to protect the criminals.” Still others sought to push back against concerns that Fusus advances a culture of surveillance that infringes on privacy and overpolices marginalized communities — mostly just by saying no, it won’t, we promise.
Opponents took aim at Fusus from multiple angles. The worry about overpolicing of particular communities isn’t crazy, but it’s overreach to morph legitimate social justice concerns into technophobia, as Councilmember Terry Vo did with a weak straw man argument: “This mentality that adopting the latest tools and systems will solve our complex social problems has got to stop.”
Also flawed were opportunity cost arguments suggesting that the money for Fusus be spent elsewhere. Councilmember Ginny Welsch declared that “we can find other ways to do what they say that this legislation does” though she offered no sense of what the thing is that can be done in other ways nor any specifics on what those ways might be. Others in opposition made reference to investing instead in underlying issues that contribute to crime and violence. One can buy this idea conceptually but still think crime solving matters. Would these opponents also have us dismantle the crime lab to free up money for community intervention programs?
A pivotal piece of the Council’s discussion revolved around the late addition of a “kill switch” provision that would let Metro immediately terminate the contract with Axon if things go awry. While supporters pointed to the kill switch as a safeguard against mayhem, opponents looked for ways to say that the kill switch doesn’t rescue Fusus from its fatal flaws.
One of those ways came in Welsch’s faulty argument that the kill switch is an insufficient guardrail because even if the switch is thrown (the Fusus contract terminated) “outside agencies can get to data that we can’t get to including video that still exists.” This makes little sense because Fusus is not itself a video storage system, and if the contract ends there is no system to hook into. Granted, video footage first accessed through Fusus could be retained by MNPD as relevant to an ongoing investigation. But that’s no different than hanging on to video from any source, like from a business with a non-Fusus camera or from Joe Rando Bystander’s cell phone. The video source is irrelevant since it is ultimately Metro’s policy for storing video that governs.
A different weak-sauce take against the kill switch came from Councilmember Jeff Preptit, who said “there will be a delay between the harm that occurs in our community until we are able to enact this kill switch, so that harm is going to take place.” This is impeccable as cause-effect reasoning: yes, odds are the harm will precede the activation of a remedy designed to respond to the harm. But to be honest this feels more like an argument for the kill switch than against it.
My own view is that the kill switch, though well intended, feels sloppily crafted because its use requires a “change in applicable law” (or policy) that results in Fusus being used in a way not specifically authorized by the Council. So what happens if it turns out that police are flouting the constraints in their policies and using the system to over-police in ways that opponents fear? They could be using Fusus in unauthorized and reprehensible ways, but the kill switch would be off limits.
Perhaps the oddest case against Fusus came from councilmember Joy Kimbrough, who argued that it is not possible to devise sufficient safeguards for a system like this because of the inevitable human element involved: “I don’t think you can legislate human behavior.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe pretty much all of every criminal code is about legislating human behavior.
Ultimately, after taking in these and other logic-challenged arguments on both sides, the Council’s vote to expand use of Fusus came just one vote short. Mayor Freddie O’Connell responded by lamenting the Council’s failure to take a step “that offered clear benefit to the safety of Nashville.” A sufficient number of councilmembers weren’t buying this claim, and who can blame them since there isn’t really any evidence to support it?
Among two councilmembers who missed the vote is one presumed to be in favor, so it could be premature to assume Fusus expansion is dead and buried. When and if this thing comes around again let’s hope for another animated argument — but next time with better arguments.
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