A Nashville Proposal Could Outsource Surveillance and Policing to a Nonprofit

Days before Thanksgiving shuffled Nashville’s political calendar, the mayor quietly submitted a resolution to approve a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to the Metro Council. The legislation would enable $15 million in state surveillance funding to flow to a local nonprofit — a controversial move that could stymie accountability over the use of such surveillance technology.

This type of funding mechanism has become something of a national trend that police agencies are using to grow their access to surveillance tools: route those technologies through private entities like nonprofits that operate beyond democratic control, essentially outsourcing surveillance and policing.

Prominently, the Atlanta Police Foundation funded and built the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, colloquially known as Cop City, for the Atlanta Police Department; the 501(c)(3) is also the official partner contracting with Flock Safety and providing the city use of the company’s notorious surveillance cameras.

In New Orleans, Project NOLA, a 501(c)(3), has built a large apparatus of more than 200 cameras through donations. News broke earlier this year that the nonprofit was conducting real time facial recognition scans and sending alerts to the New Orleans Police Department, a clear violation of city policy that went unchecked until reporting by The Washington Post revealed the arrangement.

Now, with this pending resolution, Nashville is following the lead of Atlanta, New Orleans, and other cities by leveraging a local nonprofit to build a powerful surveillance infrastructure. Nashville’s version follows the same playbook, but with a local twist that makes it particularly brazen.

Laundering Rejected Surveillance Tech

On November 21, the Friday before Thanksgiving, Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell filed a resolution to approve an MOU with the Nashville Downtown Partnership (NDP) that would facilitate the nonprofit receiving $15 million in state funds earmarked by Tennessee’s state government for public safety spending in Metro Nashville. The resolution has drawn criticism both for its use of NDP — a nonprofit that has had several major scandals within the past year — and for creating a backdoor mechanism for Nashville to purchase surveillance equipment similar to what the mayor’s office has failed to obtain through the Metro Council.

The MOU attached to the resolution plainly states that Metro Nashville will not apply for the $15 million in public safety funds set aside for its central business improvement district, instead allowing NDP, a vendor hired by that district, to apply for all the money set aside by the state.

The MOU includes a section labeled Exhibit A, which lists policing equipment, such as an armored emergency response vehicle and a mobile command center. The exhibit also lists controversial and abuse-prone technologies, including software for surveillance integration, situational awareness, digital evidence storage, as well as access to Fivecast, an AI intelligence collection tool which advertises having over 8 billion personal records in its dataset. Some items, such as the armored vehicle, detail that they would be used “to transport [Nashville police] personnel in response to Active Events” during football games and holidays. Other items, such as the surveillance software, make no reference to law enforcement agencies, and if taken at face value, suggest that the nonprofit could potentially own and operate these tools.

One service itemized in the MOU stands out as particularly startling: LeoSight is a surveillance integration platform led since March 2025 by Mark Wood, who, according to his LinkedIn, was the chief revenue officer of Fusus (a subsidiary of Axon) until February of 2024. Just months before Wood went to LeoSight, the Nashville Metro Council stalled a contract for the Fusus surveillance technology that the mayor’s office had pushed for repeatedly. The integrated law enforcement surveillance system would have linked participating privately owned cameras to Metropolitan Nashville Police Department. O’Connell, once a staunch surveillance skeptic, was dogged in his support of the tool.

After public outcry over the discovery of the latest proposed resolution, a representative from the mayor’s office sent an email to Metro Council framing the memorandum as an oversight tool limiting fund uses to what’s “already permitted by Metro” — rather than acknowledging it as an enabling document that allows a nonprofit to receive $15 million in surveillance technology, funding that Nashville could have applied for directly.

On December 1, three days before the public vote, local news outlet WKRN reported on numbers shared by NPD about how the funds would be used. The figures, which do not appear in the resolution or its attached MOU, tally up to $15 million, but notably absent were line items for the AI surveillance tool Fivecast and for LeoSight. It is unclear if they are no longer on the table or if they are being included in some other broader line items, or whether these allocations align with Metro Nashville’s ambitions or only reflect NDP’s preferences. Neither the mayor’s office nor NDP responded to Truthout’s requests for more information on the arrangement.

Nashville Downtown Partnership’s Track Record

The Tennessee nonprofit that would receive the $15 million of state funds under the MOU has been at the heart of local controversy for some time. As with virtually all business improvement districts, there are two main buckets of tasks: beautification and public safety. NDP is the primary vendor hired in Nashville to perform these tasks, though it in turn subcontracts their implementation out to two other firms: Block by Block for beautification, and Solaren for public safety.

The overall financial structure of NDP came into focus this summer when an ultimately successful move to integrate two business improvement districts under the nonprofit’s purview led to enhanced scrutiny of the organization and its management of public funds. In reviewing the relevant legislation, a local lawmaker asked why the budgets of the business improvement districts NDP operates had not been submitted for review and approval by the council, in breach of yearly requirements stipulated in Metro Code.

In July 2025, the Metro Council’s Special Counsel revealed that these budgets, which had been submitted to the council for several years after the founding of Nashville’s first business improvement district in 1998, abruptly stopped arriving for council approval in 2004, and had not been properly approved by the council for 21 years. Despite Metro Council failing to authorize these payments, Nashville’s finance department continued paying out NDP tens of millions of dollars for over two decades.

Public record requests show that since 2019, NDP has received over $40 million of funding through the city’s business improvement districts, arriving as recently as October 1, 2025. Meanwhile, according to the latest available tax returns, the yearly salary of the non-profit’s President and CEO had ballooned to nearly half a million dollars a year in 2023.

But the scandals are not limited to NDP itself. Its two primary vendors have drawn ignoble headlines in the recent past.

NDP’s security contractor, Solaren, was cited by the state of Tennessee in 2024 for 62 counts of impersonating police officers. Solaren’s eccentric owner, Jack Byrd, has made headlines for shaking off calls for accountability and transparency, and for personally owning a tank. Solaren’s officers, primarily off-duty police and Tennessee highway patrol officers (who legally retain their ability to arrest residents while working shifts for Solaren), have been accused of operating as a “shadow police force” in local media. Critics allege that Solaren’s primary focus is removing unhoused Nashvillians from the city’s high profile Lower Broadway tourist areas. “Our job is to police the homeless community,” a Solaren whistleblower told local NBC affiliate WSMV. “Profiling is what it is.”

Another NDP vendor, Block by Block, which implements the NDP’s beautification programming, made headlines when a concrete parking garage where it stored equipment, which is attached to Nashville’s downtown library, unexpectedly caught fire. The cause of the five-story garage’s partial destruction went unexplained in the initial fire investigator’s report, though independent investigative reporting revealed that several dozen propane tanks were stored where the ignition took place. The library branch is still closed without a scheduled date to reopen.

The Mayor Who Changed Course on Surveillance

The official behind the surveillance MOU is Mayor Freddie O’Connell, who built his political reputation as Metro Council’s most vocal surveillance critic before taking office. The transformation is jarring.

When on Metro Council, representing the city’s downtown core in District 19, O’Connell regularly publicly railed against surveillance in his social media posts. He even advised his followers on Twitter to obtain memberships to the privacy watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation. He warned Nashville about the dangers of public-private surveillance partnerships like what has emerged in New Orleans.

But once elected mayor, O’Connell stunned many of his supporters with his enthusiastic push for public-private surveillance tech. In the midst of advocating for the type of surveillance tools he once railed against on social media, he told a reporter from the local news outlet The Nashville Scene that his advice for anyone worried about this type of surveillance infrastructure was to “just throw your phone in the river.”

The mayor’s turn towards privacy nihilism comes at a time when surveillance is becoming big business in Nashville. Multinational tech company Oracle, the world’s 17th largest corporation by market cap, which counts the CIA as its first client, is in the process of moving its global headquarters to Nashville. The campus it is building is reportedly the single largest public–private investment in Tennessee history.

Oracle’s co-founder and CTO, Larry Ellison, has gone on record advocating for AI digital surveillance maximalism, telling an audience of financial analysts in 2024 about his vision of a digital panopticon with Oracle at its center: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

Though a Nashville-based operations hub had long been underway, the announcement of Oracle’s new headquarters took place during O’Connell’s administration in April 2024. O’Connell seems particularly attuned to Mr. Ellison’s opinion of Nashville. In October he told The Tennessean: “Last year, we heard Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison extol the quality of the life of the city that attracted them, and we work every day to improve it,” adding that “we continue working toward ensuring we reach the best outcome to set Oracle and Nashville up for success for generations to come.”

Blocking the Panopticon

It would appear that Nashville’s own mayor is ready to help the likes of Ellison achieve their vision of total recording, total control. When faced with pushback from democratic checks and balances like Nashville’s Metro Council, the strategy is clear: attempt an end run, pushing through funding proposals over a holiday break when there will be minimal time for public discussion and scrutiny.

The Metro Council still, however, has the ultimate say, with a December 4 vote on the resolution and MOU determining if the Nashville Downtown Partnership will be able to access the state funds to build surveillance infrastructure outside democratic control.

Nashville’s experience reflects a broader national trend: When surveillance technology can’t pass through democratic processes, route it through non-profits that operate beyond public accountability. The pattern is clear. The question for Nashville — and for other cities watching this unfold — is whether democratic “oversight” still means anything when it can be so easily circumvented.

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