Kathy Sinback is a local attorney known for her nonpartisan leadership and involvement in major reform efforts at the local and state levels.
Sinback has held diverse positions, including in the Public Defender’s Office, Metro Legal representing different departments, Juvenile Court, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Sinback says her reputation for working in a nonpartisan way comes from seeing the different perspectives of how systems affect people — it made her cautious about quick judgments.
“I am more interested in understanding why the problems exist before jumping into trying to solve them,” Sinback said. “I’ve come to believe that real progress rarely, if ever, comes from ideological certainty. It comes from listening carefully, following the evidence, being willing to challenge our own assumptions, and learning from and listening to people whose experiences are different from our own.”
She currently serves as the Executive Vice President of the Nashville Police + Public Safety Alliance, a nonprofit organization founded two years ago to further public safety in partnership with the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD).
What is the Nashville Police + Public Safety Alliance and what does your job as Executive Vice President entail?
The Nashville Police + Public Safety Alliance has been around for a couple of years now. It exists to help Nashville become a safer community by bringing together high-quality research and data, thoughtful conversations, and strong community partnerships. We believe that people deserve and should have honest information about public safety so that they can make informed decisions about how to keep our community safe.
My job as executive vice president is to help move that work forward by helping to oversee the projects — both research and programmatic work — and community partnerships, and work directly with MNPD, nonprofits, neighborhood community leaders, businesses, the Chamber [of Commerce], and elected officials.
A big part of what we’re doing at the Alliance is to make sure … that the community has a lot of interaction with our police department so that [they] are engaged in conversation together and not seen as separate. We want to ask the good questions that people aren’t asking about public safety, and we think it’s important to be looking at the best research. We’re reading the latest books on public safety.
One of the ones that we’ve been focusing on lately is a book called Unforgiving Places by Jens Ludwig with the University of Chicago Crime Lab. He talks about how built environment and the way we construct our community spaces is essential to building a safe community, which means having real community where there are people who are watching out for their neighbors, having lighting in neighborhoods, and thinking through what it means to have a safe community by following the evidence of other places that have succeeded with decreasing crime in their communities through evidence-based practices.
We want to look carefully at the evidence and help to elevate the conversation about public safety in a way that’s thoughtful, respectful and grounded in a way that will make Nashville a truly safer community.
What are the five-year goals of the Nashville Police + Public Safety Alliance?
Over the next five years, we want to become a trusted resource for research data, and informed public dialogue about public safety is one of our goals.
We want to expand our work on crime data and safety sentiments, which we’ve already started with our data dashboard, which is online. It is a really robust resource where we take all of the MNPD crime data. We make it user friendly so that you’re able to see neighborhood level data on all UCR Part 1 crimes, which are the serious felony crimes, both violent crimes and property crimes.
We also want to broaden the conversation about public safety, because prevention and community investment are absolutely essential and primary to public safety, but so is policing. We think it’s important to talk not only about what policing shouldn’t be, but also what excellent policing looks like. So things like how do we recruit and retain exceptional officers? How do officers build trust with the community? How do we make sure that every neighborhood receives the same high level of service?
Our data showed in a recent research project called Nashville and its Peers: Policing and Public Safety that our police response rates are very high. And we know that not having sufficient coverage in our communities is also an equity issue. So we really want to work on recruiting more officers, to fill available spots in the department so that we continue to have equitable and quick response rates throughout our community.
We believe that supporting excellence in policing means making sure that the police department is able to recruit and retain, has training, technology, leadership, and wellness resources necessary to provide the level of service that Nashville needs and that Nashvillians deserve. That doesn’t mean any particular type of technology. We want to elevate those questions about technology. We want to look at what are other cities doing. And if [Nashville is] making decisions to either add technology or not add technology, we want to make sure that we’re looking at what are any trade-offs and what are the pros and cons and really having a very detailed and thorough conversation about why other police departments are going in certain directions and what’s best for Nashville.
And then if we want to, for example, not adopt certain technologies, then it’s also important for us to look at [whether there] are other ways that we can decrease response rates and things like that.
We want to make sure that our police has the leadership and wellness resources necessary to provide the level of service that Nashvillians deserve. We’re proud of our police department and its commitment to continuous improvement. We have one of the CALEA (Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies) certified police departments. That is one of the elite certifications for police departments in the country, which requires a real dedication to excellence in policing.
We also think that wellness is incredibly important and that we should have police officers who are able to deal with the emotional trauma that they go through. That’s really essential to having a good, effective and ethical police department [with] people who are able to be healthy and emotionally well. We provide a leadership training program, and we want to continue that. It’s called ASPIRE, and it’s a program that the Alliance started with another group called InteraWorks, where we provide high-level leadership training that is not law enforcement-centric training. It’s about things like empathy and leadership and building community trust.
Another focus over the next five years is that we want our police to be able to live in Nashville. We think it’s important, for equity reasons and also for the well-being of our police officers, that the people who are policing a city are residents of that community. We don’t think people should be coming from outside a community to police a community that’s not their own. And so we really want to be able to make it affordable for police officers to live in Nashville, which is very difficult right now.
Nashville has seen renewed public discussion about policing following the release of the Alliance’s Peer Cities report that you mentioned and the Metro Human Relations Commission’s response to it. How do you think our community can have productive conversations about public safety when there are such different perspectives on the role of policing?
I think the first step is recognizing that most [people] in the public safety conversation want the same outcome. They want people to be safe. They want children to have opportunities in our community. They want communities to trust the police department, and they want everyone to be treated fairly. But what we sometimes get caught up in is focusing on only one part of the public safety picture.
Prevention is essential. So are reducing poverty and discrimination, expanding educational opportunities, work opportunities, and improving access to housing and mental health care and all of those other things that go into a good prevention program. All of those things influence public safety. But policing is also an essential part of the conversation.
One of the reasons that I joined the Alliance to focus on policework is that I believe that communities should have a voice in shaping what policing looks like. Of course, the history of our country has shown what happens when police departments fail to protect all residents equally. And so, accountability, transparency, and community trust are important. But I think it’s also important that we talk about policing in a positive and constructive way to complement the accountability side.
We need to not only be asking what have the police done wrong at times, which is important, but we also need to be asking, what does ethical and effective policing really look like? How do we recruit the right people, people who are exceptionally professional? How do we support our police officers through the stress of the job? And how do we build a department that is deeply connected to the community it serves and that not only has the trust of the community but also is truly a trustworthy department? I don’t see those conversations as competing with prevention or with equity or with our goal of fixing historical inequities in our community.
I really see the conversations as complementary. Safe communities obviously invest in children and families, address the root causes of crime, address our largest issues like poverty and availability of services. But safe communities also build excellent police departments that are trusted, well-trained, and responsive to the communities that they serve.
We’re glad that people are talking about the paper, and we’re glad that people are talking about these issues because all of the different perspectives on public safety are critical to working together to make our community safer. I hope that Nashville continues to have really honest conversations where we listen carefully to each other, where we acknowledge complexity, and where we can stay focused on what helps people live safer and healthier lives in Nashville.
Does the Alliance ever work with the Community Oversight Board or is that on the horizon?
We have had a wonderful meeting with them, and we are excited about the work that they’re doing. We hope to partner with them because we believe that we are sort of another angle of the same goal, which is having police departments that are both accountable to the community and well resourced. And so we’re really excited to partner with them in the future.
What, in your personal opinion, are the top three issues our community could do to improve public safety?
The first one is investing in children and families before they ever become involved in the justice system. Over my 30 years in all the many different aspects of the criminal justice system, I’ve seen how childhood trauma, unstable housing, addiction, untreated mental illness, and just a general lack of opportunity can shape the course of a person’s life. And if we want to reduce crime over the long term, we have to give young people real opportunities to succeed and give them the support they need to make safe and healthy choices in their lives.
The second one would be, we need to continue building an outstanding police department. When people call 911 because something’s going on because they’re in danger, they deserve a police department that is responsive, that’s well trained, that’s effective, that is compassionate, and does its job well. I would love to see us continue recruiting and retaining excellent officers, investing in leadership development and officer wellness, which I talked about before, and then strengthening the relationship between the officers and the neighborhoods they serve. I want the community to continue supporting the police department’s commitment to improvement and excellence in policing.
And then the third one is really having more honest and evidence-based conversations about public safety. I’ve been in many different parts of the criminal justice system. And what I’ve learned is that when it comes to crime, there’s never a simple story. I represented children accused of crimes, spent time with many victims of violence, worked alongside the police department when I was the attorney for the police department and saw from the inside how officers have to deal with extraordinarily difficult and complex situations.