Three Nashville police officers were decommissioned after taking part in an armed raid on the wrong home, entering an apartment where a mother and her two young children were inside.
The altercation took place in the city’s Edgehill neighborhood early Tuesday morning, according to a press release. Body camera footage showed the armed officers forcing open the apartment’s door around 6:05 a.m. The mother can be heard responding to the police and asking why they were there.
Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD) Interim Chief John Drake said during a press conference Wednesday that the officers were undercover and executing an evidentiary search warrant connected to vehicle burglaries, but that the information leading officers to this particular apartment was “stale.”
The officers had gotten the apartment’s address from a Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency database that hadn’t been updated since November 2018. They did attempt to use keys to enter the apartment, but the locks were changed because the new family had been living there for the past four months, WTVF reported.
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“I’m greatly disturbed by the video you just viewed. In all candor, this shouldn’t have happened,” Drake said during the press conference. “This mother and her children should not have been subjected to this type of behavior by our police department.”
The department’s officer of professional accountability is now investigating the incident to determine why the officers involved used force when the evidentiary search warrant did not involve a violent criminal. The suspect in question is 16 years old and had not lived at the apartment since last summer, according to the press release.
Sergeant Jeff Brown, Lieutenant Harrison Dooley, and Officer Michael Richardson were decommissioned while the investigation is conducted. “Decommissioning” is an MNPD-specific policy that temporarily revokes an officer’s policing authority, and is a nonpunitive administrative action, the Tennessean reported in 2016.
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Drake explained that the “problem” the department has with the officers’ behavior lies with the urgency in which they entered the home.
“What was the urgency to get inside once you knocked? Why couldn’t we have given them more time to respond at 6:05 a.m.?” Drake said, adding that while the officers knocked and announced their presence “to a degree” before entering, the situation was ultimately “not acceptable at all.”
Drake announced two changes that would be implemented within the department as a result of the incident: a deputy chief must now approve a search warrant before it can be conducted, and crime suppression units would receive updated training to review topics like issuing search warrants and surveillance tactics.
Drake expressed his regret to the innocent family.
“From the bottom of my heart and the bottom of the heart of this police department, this is not what we stand for,” he said. “We want to take care of this family. We want to do whatever we can to help them moving forward.”
Newsweek contacted the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department for further comment, but did not hear back in time for publication.
