By Logan Langlois
NASHVILLE, TN — A crowd of excited guests took their seats Thursday, facing seven chairs set up spread out on top of a slightly elevated stage and a podium standing stage left inside the Dr. Wayne Riley Auditorium of Meharry Medical College.
The crowd chatter dissipated as opening remarks began with Executive Director Rashawn Ray Ph.D., followed by District 21 Council Member Brandon Taylor, welcoming the guests, and summarizing some of the topics of the night’s discussion. Introductory remarks concluded with a presentation from AIR Pipeline Partnership Program Intern Virginia Sparks, who gave a detailed presentation regarding how Black school children are disproportionately given punishment and set the stage for the discussion taking place that evening; how the Black community is being impacted by various threats to public safety.
The American Institutes for Research, AIR, organized the forum to discuss youth justice and public safety, meant to highlight community-driven, evidence-informed approaches to reducing violence against Black and other minority communities. Throughout the night, two different panels were invited to come up and speak, first taking the podium provided and addressing the crowd individually regarding their research and qualifications pertaining to the event, then taking a seat along the set chairs with their five other invited guests and their Grammy Nominated evening monitor Aloe Blacc. While addressing the crowd, the guests guided their crowd through the hundreds of hours of research and experience they had participated in, or coordinated, regarding programs and efforts that can act to greatly improve relations between the Black community and police, and how to effectively work to correct dangerous behavior within police departments.
The forum also talked extensively about how mass shootings have impacted the way Nashvillians are addressing public safety.
“One of the children killed in the Covenant Shooting, my co-fellow, my college, someone whom i had just hired at capacity as the Executive Vice Chair, her son was killed the very first day she was supposed to start working,” said Executive Vice Chair, Department of Radiology Vanderbilt University Medical Center Laveil Allen, M.D.
“What I hate seeing as an emergency radiologist is gunshot wounds,” Allen said. “And what I really hate seeing is gunshot wounds coming from a high-caliber rifle. Put that in perspective for me, personal and professional, the Waffle House shooting that occurred here in Nashville. I was on call and I saw how a high-powered rifle devastated a human body.”
These conversations also come during a time in which one of Nashville’s zip codes is tallied as the highest incarceration rate in the county in recent years.
“The first thing is using evidence, knowledge, and research to then activate people to get involved to play a role in the process,” Director Ray said during an interview immediately following the presentation. “I think following that, is to actually amplify the everyday experiences that particularly Black youth are having here in Nashville, and to help people understand that there’s not one-size-fits-all. This isn’t simply kids acting badly, this is literally over-policing, surveillance, and oppression.”
The evening concluded with questions from the audience which followed up on many of the topics that had been discussed throughout the night. Questions were asked to the second assembled panel and ranged from anywhere to how citizens can expect to reform the deeper issues ingrained into American policing since its founding, with only the tools being given to the public by the very institutions that have helped uphold said policing’s perceived lack of accountability, to how an institution like a government can wish to console something like a mother who has just lost her child to gun violence.
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