DATA: Traffic stops in Nashville increased by more than 50% compared to this time last year
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Traffic stops in Metro Nashville have increased compared to this time last year, according to data from the police department.
The new data comes after the Metro Council passed a resolution urging the Metro Nashville Police Department and the Nashville Department of Transportation and Multimodal Infrastructure to increase traffic enforcement.
NOVEMBER 2024 | Metro Council calls for increased traffic enforcement from MNPD and NDOT
Since taking office, Metro Councilmember for District 11 Jeff Eslick said that speed has been a top concern in the Old Hickory and Hermitage areas.
'Speeding is still an issue in and around Nashville — not just in my district,' Eslick told News 2.
Though Eslick has previously sponsored a resolution asking the MNPD to increase traffic enforcement, not all Metro Councilmembers were on board at the time.
'We did not want to go back to the times where MNPD was stopping 7.7 times the national average for traffic stops when MNPD was stopping more Black drivers,' District 2 Councilmember Kyontzé Toombs said in January.
A resolution passed in January with some amendments, including prioritizing enforcement for reckless driving, driving under the influence, speeding and distracted driving infractions.
JANUARY | Metro Council passes amended version of traffic enforcement resolution
'The traffic stops did really decrease over a five- to seven-year period,' Eslick said.
However, Eslick said it's encouraging to see the numbers go back up to catch drivers breaking the law.
'There are still some people out there — whether it's drag racing or just on the edge of it,' Eslick said. 'They seem to be living in a video game and doing what they want, and I think now the police are saying, 'We're looking. Be careful.''
Now, Eslick hopes to turn the focus to drivers speeding through neighborhoods and along secondary streets.
'We're looking for, potentially a tax hike here, so what are we getting for our money? I think that's a question that residents ask often. 'Is our city safe? Is our city clean? Is our money being spent most efficiently?'' Eslick said. 'And I think we are getting a little bit more bang for a buck compared to this time last year.'
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
American Politics Only Pretends to Work
There is a pervasive feeling—rising up from the precarious working poor, through the illusory middle class, and now even brushing the edges of the elite—that something in America is broken. The carefully curated illusions of American life, which held just enough weight to seem real for much of my millennial lifetime, are beginning to collapse. These illusions were constructed in the shadow of post-Reagan neoliberalism, just as the rot began to eat away at the gains of the postwar economy. Poverty and racism have always made liberty and justice feel like empty promises for many, but for protected classes, the illusion could endure. So much so that by the time I reached college—coinciding with the first term of Barack Obama—it was fashionable to declare that we had entered a post-racial America. Now those delusions lie bloodied in the street. We have seen law-abiding citizens snatched off the street, a billionaire oligarch turned loose to deconstruct the civil service. Meanwhile, that chasm between those with more than enough and those with nothing keeps widening. If there was an 'Obama legacy,' then it's mostly vanished. The optics of progress have failed to mask its absence. On May 16, Maryland Governor Wes Moore—a Democrat, a Rhodes scholar, and the only Black governor in the country—sent a letter to the president of the Maryland State Senate, vetoing a bill passed by the state legislature that would have created a reparations commission to study the economic and social case for compensating Black Marylanders for the enduring harms of slavery and its legacy. The headlines suggested betrayal. 'Maryland Governor Vetoes Reparations Bill,' read The New York Times' headline. 'Gov. Moore vetoes bill creating a state commission to study reparations,' wrote The Baltimore Banner. But the governor's letter tells a more nuanced story. 'I strongly believe now is not the time for another study,' Moore wrote. 'Now is the time for continued action that delivers results for the people we serve.' The sentiment that a substantial body of research exists bears out. The evidence is already there. The impacts of slavery, redlining, racial violence, and economic exclusion have been documented in study after study by universities, think tanks, and government agencies alike. The racial wealth gap in America—which is a topic that does not want for robust news coverage or analysis—remains staggering: The average white family holds nearly 10 times the wealth of the average Black family. In cities like Baltimore and all across the country, formerly redlined neighborhoods remain poorer, sicker, and less resourced than their white counterparts. Economist Sandy Darity, the Brookings Institution, and the Federal Reserve have all produced rigorous economic models showing the effects of slavery and other racist programs on Black wealth and showing how reparative programs could substantially narrow these disparities—even lengthening the lives of Black Americans. Echoing these findings, The California Reparations Report proposed direct cash payments and broad institutional reforms—ranging from guaranteed access to health care and housing to tax-exempt status for reparations payments—as essential components of a comprehensive state-level strategy to repair the enduring economic and social harms of slavery and its afterlives. But here's the rub: The bill that Moore spiked was never actually about discovering new facts to lay alongside the vast mountain of already-obtained knowledge. Rather, it's a quintessentially American ritual. A performance of forward motion that, in reality, preserves the status quo: activity masquerading as achievement. We are not waiting for more data. We are waiting for the willpower of political elites to catch up to the facts we have already gathered about the state of the world. We are hoping that we might create a force strong enough to dissolve the lucrative web of mutual dependence that exists between politicians, their funders, and their funding recipients—an arrangement that allows the few to profit from the entrenched policies that impoverish the many. For much of my lifetime, the nation, like our tech devices, has operated like a machine engineered for planned obsolescence: appearing functional on the surface but designed to slowly degrade beneath the hood. Our dissatisfaction is tempered by the allure of a shiny new upgrade that promises new features each campaign cycle. Like our top-grossing movies, election cycles are reboots and franchises. That includes our politics. Our institutions don't just fail; they are built to delay, to degrade, to defer. We pretend they work, and when they don't, we hold another hearing, commission another report, launch another study, believe another is hardly the first to challenge these neglectful impulses. More than a decade ago, The Atlantic published Ta-Nehisi Coates's landmark essay 'The Case for Reparations.' It was not merely a manifesto but a meticulous historical excavation—from redlining in Chicago to the GI Bill's racist exclusions—that laid out in irrefutable detail how government policy, not just private prejudice, created Black disadvantage. It forced a national conversation. But again, the response was mostly talk. On June 1, however, Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols—who once opposed reparations—announced a historic local plan for survivors and descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. The city would fund direct payments and long-term support programs. It is a rare instance where moral clarity translated into material commitment. But Tulsa is the exception, not the rule. This policy of forever kicking the can down the road in the name of respecting some phantasmal process is not unique to reparations. The same pattern plays out across the political spectrum: Universal basic income pilots have consistently shown that giving people money reduces poverty, homelessness, and even mental illness—yet most federal assistance remains conditional and insufficient. Restorative justice programs show lower recidivism than punitive sentences—particularly for youth—yet U.S. incarceration rates have remained the highest in the world since 2002. The information is known. The solutions exist. They are simply not acted upon. The political class often blames this inertia on partisan gridlock. But that too is an illusion—one as fragile as it is convenient. The apparent opposition between parties masks a deeper consensus: Both benefit from a system that rewards performative conflict over substantive change, ensuring that donor interests and institutional power remain undisturbed regardless of which party holds office. What has not changed since the 1990s is the sheer number of Americans who do not vote at all. In 1992, Joan Didion wrote in The New York Review that political apathy was a misdiagnosis: the real condition was disenchantment, a loss of faith that the system could deliver anything meaningful. And while raw turnout numbers have rebounded from the dismal 1990s, it remains the case that disaffection is a constant presence. I saw it firsthand while teaching an introductory sociology class in Washington, D.C., in the autumn of 2024. As expected in a presidential election year, every discussion of social issues circled back to politics. My students, who represented the population of their majority-Black, working-class university, were thoughtful and interested but wary. One student offered the familiar argument: that nonvoters had only themselves to blame; they are uninformed and unengaged. But an older Black woman in the class cut in. She worked with unhoused Washingtonians who, she said, don't see much difference between life under either party. And how could they? Their material circumstances have not changed. In 2024, the Democratic Party—once the party of labor—ran its campaign flanked by billionaires and Bush-era Republicans. While Donald Trump performed populism in a McDonald's, Kamala Harris held fundraisers with Mark Cuban and the Cheneys. Campaigns are fought on vibes and not policy. While Kamala Harris had a 'Brat Summer,' Trump, a Manhattan-made real estate developer, played to rural crowds. Their policy disagreements and, especially, their pro-war consensus on foreign policy and neoliberal economics are rarely discussed. One party cosplays populism, and the other cosplays credibility. All that has shifted since the '90s is which party plays which role. What has changed since the Clinton era is not political substance but political spectacle. Social media has democratized access to information and sharpened our ability to see the rupture between what is promised and what is real. There is now a generation fluent in disillusionment. The Democratic National Committee itself has become a case study in illusion maintenance: from undermining Bernie Sanders as the leading candidate in 2020 to burying debates, to pretending Joe Biden's cognitive decline is a fabrication rather than a crisis of leadership. When David Hogg—a Parkland school shooting survivor and one of five DNC vice chairs—challenged the party's refusal to reckon with younger, more progressive voters and threatened to primary incumbents, he wasn't breaking ranks; he was breaking the fourth wall. And now his sentence may be ousting. My generation has watched the lives promised to us slip away based on a political consensus we were not alive to agree upon, conceived by a club we've not been invited to join. While a cycle of progress and backlash has emerged on some social issues, such as same-sex marriage and abortion, neoliberal financial policies embraced by both major parties have left millennials unable to buy houses, afford kids, or even buy groceries without financing them through buy-now-pay-later apps like Klarna—which is now facing losses and pausing its IPO in part because we can't pay them back. Meanwhile, policies supporting deregulation of financial markets, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and austerity measures have persisted throughout our lifetimes. These are the policies that political elites keep recycling as 'solutions' to our problems; meanwhile, these strategies only further widen income inequality and economic insecurity. Banking deregulation under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 paved the way for risky financial practices that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Similarly, trade agreements like NAFTA, which went into effect in 1994, prioritized corporate interests over labor protections, resulting in job losses and stagnant wages for American workers. Just a few weeks ago, the Senate, by bipartisan acclamation, passed an industry-friendly crypto deregulation bill, the direct fruits of crypto donors drowning Washington in slush money. This is a deeply entrenched way of doing business, one that reflects a larger failure to adapt to changing economic realities and contribute to ongoing challenges faced by younger generations. We should think of Governor Moore's veto like this: He didn't reject reparations; he rejected this whole charade. And the culture is catching up. Even our consumer habits reflect the growing revolt against disposability. Across the country, citizens are fighting for 'right to repair' laws, demanding that tech companies let people fix their own devices rather than forcing them to buy replacements. Behind that demand is a deeper yearning—for durability, for agency, for something built to last. We should want the same from our politics. But our civic infrastructure is designed more for optics than policy action. Commissioned research is a dress rehearsal for a play that will never debut. A 25-hour 'filibuster' that blocked no bill is marketing for Senator Cory Booker's new book. Every moral breakthrough is deferred until the next election cycle. We have outsourced moral courage to process. Governor Moore's veto was a rare political moment that acknowledged what so many Americans now suspect: We are not in need of more evidence or rhetoric—we are in need of political will and action. We know how to fix what's broken. The question is whether we still have the courage to stop pretending and pick up the tools to repair it.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Silver Alert issued for West Nashville woman with dementia
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation issued a Silver Alert for a missing woman who was last seen Sunday in Davidson County. According to officials, Judith Tillett, 76, is believed to have left her West Nashville home wearing shorts, a white T-shirt and running shoes. She is 5 feet 1 inch tall and 129 pounds with gray hair and brown eyes. She may be driving a black 2008 Acura with the license plate number 'BGP3103.' Metro Police said the vehicle's paint is faded to gray in some areas. Officials said Tillett has dementia, and may not be able to return safely without assistance. Anyone who sees Tillett is asked to call the Metro Nashville Police Department at 615-862-8600 or TBI at 1-800-TBI-FIND. 📲 Download the News 2 app to stay updated on the go.📧 Sign up for WKRN email alerts to have breaking news sent to your inbox.💻 for Nashville, TN and all of Middle Tennessee. This is a developing story. WKRN News 2 will continue to update this article as new information becomes available. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
New WA agency investigating police deadly force incidents sees budget cuts
This screenshot from Kitsap County Sheriff's Office body camera footage shows the moments before law enforcement killed Justin Moegling near Poulsbo last month. (Kitsap County Sheriff's Office) The night of May 7 was a challenge for Washington's nascent agency tasked with investigating when police kill people. The new state Office of Independent Investigations started looking into such cases in December. But only in a swath of western Washington, stretching from the northwestern edge of the Olympic Peninsula to Clark and Skamania counties on the border with Oregon. Lawmakers established the office as an alternative to cops investigating when other cops use deadly force. Around 9 p.m. May 7 near Poulsbo, officers from the local police department and Kitsap County sheriff's deputies tried to subdue a man who had a knife after a traffic stop, the Office of Independent Investigations later reported. Unable to get Justin Moegling, 41, into custody, a Poulsbo officer and Kitsap County deputy reportedly shot him in the head. The state agency sent 15 investigators to the scene. Minutes before midnight in Ridgefield, a Clark County deputy stabbed Marc Fogle, 54, who was held on suspicion of driving under the influence, after he allegedly tried to steal the deputy's gun, investigators say. Fogle died from his injuries. The agency had to reroute a few investigators from Poulsbo to Ridgefield, more than 150 miles away. Others had to come from as far as Spokane to respond. These are two of the four cases the investigative office has responded to in the past seven months. Elsewhere in Washington, teams made up of local detectives from multiple police departments are the ones investigating after officers kill someone. Creation of the state office was driven by the increased push for police accountability in cases where officers use deadly force, especially against Black people, after the deaths of George Floyd in Minnesota and Manuel Ellis in Tacoma. Now, supporters of the agency say budget cuts passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Bob Ferguson last month could threaten the fledgling office's momentum. It took years to get off the ground before December's launch, having to hire new staff, develop policies and conduct training from scratch. Last month, investigators issued their first report, on a fatal police shooting in Vancouver that came just a few days after the office opened. The office's director, Roger Rogoff, still expects to expand the office's reach to another of its half-dozen regions this year. Where exactly that'll be remains to be seen. The more dense King and Pierce counties are each considered their own 'region.' Still, community advocates worry about the cuts. Nickeia Hunter, whose brother was killed by police, said it 'sends the wrong message' to scale back funding for an agency created in light of 'decades of injustice and erasure.' 'While I'm glad to hear Director Rogoff still intends to expand into another region, the reality is that underfunding accountability infrastructure directly undermines trust — especially in communities that have been historically harmed by law enforcement,' Hunter said in an email. Coming into 2025, the Office of Independent Investigations asked the governor and Legislature for more than $53 million in the next two-year budget. This would've been a hike of 40% from its current state funding, mostly focused on increasing staffing. A lack of investigators, especially east of the Cascades, is the biggest issue standing in the agency's way of expanding more quickly. 'It is wholly dependent on us having sufficient resources available,' Rogoff said, noting legislators had previously underestimated how many investigators the office would need. The money would've paid for hiring an additional 30 investigators over the next two years. Instead, lawmakers slashed the office's budget by more than 20%, to a biennial total under $30 million, in the face of a multibillion-dollar budget shortfall that forced a range of cuts. 'I worry about our special needs kids in our schools, I worry about food insecurity, I worry about our immigrant community,' said Sen. Manka Dhingra, a Redmond Democrat and chair of the Senate Law and Justice Committee. 'These are the cuts that were felt all across state government.' Part of the cut to the Office of Independent Investigations' budget was driven by several million dollars the agency hadn't spent that lawmakers had previously approved, said Dhingra, who worked with Rogoff at the King County prosecutor's office. Rogoff is thankful the Legislature didn't chop even more funding. And he's proud of his team's work so far. 'We've hired 63 people in two and a half years, and the level of efficiency and talent and work done in these investigations is pretty phenomenal,' said Rogoff, a former King County judge and prosecutor. Hires include investigators, liaisons for the families of victims, and others. Rogoff wishes the agency was already working statewide. But he promised not to put staff in a position where they're investigating cases without the proper training and resources. 'I will continue to abide by that promise,' he said. 'I think that doing these investigations badly is the worst thing that could happen to this agency.' He's confident lawmakers will eventually give his office the money needed for the additional hiring. In the Vancouver shooting, the Clark County prosecutor is currently reviewing the evidence behind the state office's 99-page report before deciding whether to charge the officer involved. Anna Klein, the chief criminal deputy prosecutor in Clark County, said her office hopes to reach a conclusion in the 'near future.' For years, progressive Democrats have wanted to establish an independent prosecutor to make those choices, given how closely county prosecutors work with local law enforcement. But they've repeatedly failed in that goal, a top priority for police accountability advocates like Hunter. Many of the agency's investigators come from law enforcement backgrounds. If candidates have had a policing job within two years, they have to get approval from the office's advisory board. Beyond the inquiries into new cases, those investigators are also tasked with looking at old instances where police used deadly force and new evidence has been discovered. Members of the public can submit review requests online. The agency has taken up nine such cases, from places ranging from Poulsbo to Yakima to Snohomish County. None have been completed. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
