The Contributor talked with Mike Lacey, Metro’s deputy director of community safety from the Mayor’s Office of Community Safety as part of a series called A Few Questions With where we interview Metro agencies about their most pressing issues.
The Community Safety Office is housed within the Mayor’s Office and has three staff members. Next to Lacey, Ron Johnson serves as the director of community safety and Breanna Tillman as the grants manager.
Describe the main purpose of the Office of Community Safety in five sentences.
The Office of Community Safety was created in 2021 to help the city to be more responsive to community-based violence, which is violence that happens outside the home. It is often tied to systemic disenfranchisement and lack of opportunity. Our mission has been to implement programs and strategies to reduce the likelihood of community violence. We know that poverty, exposure to violence, lack of education opportunity and stable housing along with a whole host of other psychosocial conditions increase the rates of violence.
We have three prongs of programs. The first being community development, the second violence interruption, and the third violence intervention.
You are housed within the Mayor’s Office. What is your budget, and how are you funded?
We were created in 2021, initially there was $1 million for violence interruption programming. The next year, there [was] $2 million added, and then we had some grant funding from the Governor’s Office that was really pass-through ARP (American Rescue Plan) support. As we are moving into this next fiscal year, we were hoping that we would have $5 million for services that we have designs to be fully allocated and used by the end of the fiscal year.
In the context of expenditures like this for violence prevention, you can compare us to other cities like Philadelphia. When you look at the per capita spending for violence prevention [in Philadelphia], they’re spending about 66 times what Nashville is. They are at the more progressive end of active violence prevention. Nashville does not have an Office of Violence Prevention, our work is not chartered and institutionalized, and as such is subject to being defunded and [dependent on] grant funding to continue.
What are your top three achievements so far?
As the first achievement, I want to highlight [the journey of] Jameka Usher. She is a resident of the Napier-Sudekum housing complex. She was also the head of the tenants association there. We were able to provide funding to the Raphah Institute to do restorative justice programming in Napier and Sudekum.
When they were looking to hire for the program, they turned to Jameka and hired her along with the man who was the hero of the Waffle House shooting. Jameka is a resident who had been in a position of seeming influence, but had found that in the role she had been given as the leader of this community group, she was not able to make a difference in the residents’ lives, and she actually resigned before this job offer came through. But [in this new position] she has been having a really wonderful experience there from what we’ve heard and is, on a daily basis, able to help her neighbors resolve conflict.
That’s exactly the kind of case study we want to see. There is funding from a group that is not this huge national group but is fairly connected. Honestly the Raphah Institute is a bit larger and more established than a lot of the groups that we support. But the fact that they hired someone from the community to serve that community and are paying her a fair wage to serve her neighbors is… I cried when I first heard it.
The next one I want to talk about was the launching of a Group Violence Intervention (GVI) program. The GVI program is working with law enforcement to identify the men and women who are most likely to be victims or perpetrators of gun violence and helping them. Period.
What we understand is that when people have their needs met, their behaviors change, and that behavior change trickles out to their social network. A thing that has been said explicitly in meetings where we had the police chief, the mayor, heads of Parole and Probation in a conversation led by the John Jay School of Criminal Justice, the old strategies haven’t worked. If you just take an ice cream scoop and scoop out the people who we think are the “real problems,” you’ve caused harm in that community, and you have just other people fill in that gap of violence and socially detrimental behavior. If you help people in those situations, their behavior changes, and that trickles down, and it actually solves issues of generational poverty and [addresses] trauma that are the root causes of these issues.
The other thing I want to highlight is The Village network surpassing 700 members. These are all leaders of mostly minority grassroot community groups who have never been brought together in any sort of list, much less like meeting. And they’re now offered $5,000 of professional development services per organization including everything you would need to receive larger grant funding. We provide grant-writing support, free of charge audits if you’re eligible for a Metro audit but you don’t have that in place. We’re in many ways seeing the collective power in the number of people that they reach and lives they change finally being understood. Let me put it this way, everyone who is running for mayor is interested in who The Village is going to vote for.
Metro Council just approved a $137,000 grant to The Contributor for Community Safety Programs. In essence, the contract calls for an expansion of the Where To Turn In Nashville resource guide and the development of a user-friendly website.
How does this resource bring improved value to your office and the community?
I do have a lot of excitement about this grant with The Contributor. I think what Linda [Bailey] has done at The Contributor and Open Table Nashville in making this Where To Turn in Nashville resource is a timely and forward-looking way to help people. [Much of this information] is “googleable” but when people are in crisis, they need help from something that is designed to help you when you are in that crisis. For example, when you’re looking for a hot meal, [Where To Turn In Nashville] doesn’t just give you a list of the places with hot food, it puts the days of the week and times that you can go there.
As knowledge becomes cheaper and as AI emerges to process information, what organizations need to do to make a difference in people’s lives is design things that [create] less friction in between what you need and understanding how to get it. What Where To Turn In Nashville has done is put a flag in the ground [saying] this is the way we need to meet people where they’re at. And taking that to the internet is not in any way competition with any other resources. In fact, the underlying data should be shared and is public information. Having competing attempts to design more user-friendly access to information is exactly the kind of innovation that needs to be happening in the public service space.
I don’t think Nashville fundamentally has a resource problem; we have an information problem. We have a communication and collaboration problem. And Where To Turn in Nashville is a great step in the right direction that we want to support.
Since you are located within the Mayor’s Office, what is the sustainability plan for your office once this administration leaves?
That’s the question. Part of the answer is that of the three prongs that we discussed – community development, violence prevention, and violence interruption – the last two are in some ways easiest and most necessary to institutionalize in the city. There is an active conversation where these can be placed within the Metro departments that would create an Office of Violence Prevention to oversee these strategic initiatives. There is additional grant funding being sought from the federal government that would support that type of work.
When it comes to the community development work, we’ve always had to leverage third-party vendors to process the financial aspects of paying for consultants and direct aid to organizations because municipalities really aren’t set up for smaller payments like that in an effective way. In that sense, the actual operations of community development may be able to operate outside the government in a nonprofit setting where it is still fully transparent to the public [about] what its activities are and how and if it is continuing to serve organizations in a way it needs to.
A thing that people flag with us is, whether moving this to a nonprofit status lessen the convening power of the Mayor’s Office. My personal conclusion is that it seems very fair and important for the mayor to be invited into this space. But ultimately it’s the people who should be convening through their own power. It’s not for anyone in an elected position to be giving power to the citizens. They are the ones with the power.