The Metro Human Relations Commission Does Not Have Patience For Unscientific "Reports" Pushing for AI-Powered Corporate Mass Surveillance

Newest NPJ Post: What do we mean by public safety, and who gets to define it? The MHRC is not mincing words.

On June 30, 2026, Nashville’s Metro Human Relations Commission (MHRC) released its response to a document recently presented to the Metro Council’s Public Health and Safety Committee that advocated for expanding what I’ve called “AI-Powered Corporate Mass Surveillance”.

The document the MHRC was responding to is a “report” commissioned by the Police + Public Safety Alliance, a non-profit whose sole beneficiary is MNPD. The MHRC’s verdict about this report is scathing: “We believe the report’s analysis is fundamentally flawed in its framing, methodology and scope.”

You can read the original report here.

The response can be read in full on the new publication I have launched with Robin L. Owen of Jesus Urbanist, Nashville Peoples’ Journal.

MHRC’s response is deeply researched and is about as critical a review as one can get in the anodyne world of public safety policy analysis. It is a profound repudiation of one-sided public safety conversations that claim to be objective research but are, what I would call, “paid-for copaganda,” far more rooted in “vibes” that appeal to the people commissioning said reports than anything that could approach the term “research”.

The fact that violent crime is dropping without massive investments in spying on our neighbors is treated, in the report, not as an indication that spying is not a path towards safer communities, but as a curious anomaly to be brushed aside in favor of endorsing AI-Powered Corporate Mass Surveillance tech like license plate readers, tools that even the Public Safety Alliance’s report must confess have no track record whatsoever of preventing or reducing crimes.

MHRC is not alone in its critiques of this report. A similar vein of critical feedback was given when the report was presented to the Metro Council’s Public Health and Safety Committee. In that hearing, Council Member At-Large Zulfat Suara pointed to the report’s own metrics and noted that it is quite strange that Nashville is being criticized for not having an intensive surveillance dragnet, whilst the cities with the most of this technology also have the highest crime rates.

The report was written by my former boss from the Cooper-era community safety office, John Buntin. Mr. Buntin is a former O’Connell consultant paid through a Department of Law contract, and he wrote the report for the Nashville Police + Public Safety Alliance.

Since serving as Nashville’s Director of Community Safety in the Cooper Administration, Mr. Buntin seems to have left behind any pretense of advocating for non-surveillance-based approaches to preventing crime (the types of things I served under him to help implement). As the MHRC response to Buntin’s report notes:

“Missing from the report is any meaningful comparison between surveillance technologies and other evidence-based public safety interventions such as violence interruption programs, youth employment initiatives, affordable housing, behavioral health services, substance use treatment, food security programs and trauma-informed victim support.”

As someone whose job was literally to implement these programs in Nashville from the Mayor’s Office, I can tell you they have strong evidence supporting their ability to prevent and reduce crime. And given that Nashville has, in fact, seen violence dramatically decline these past few years, I’d suggest that organizations claiming to care about public safety might better invest their time and resources by researching which of these programs may actually be driving down our crime rates and could use more funding and institutional support. These are the programs I helped stand up (ironically under Mr. Buntin’s oversight).

I’ve written about my frustrations with the report before, so I’ll let MHRC’s response speak for itself. It is presented in full on NPJ. Use NPJ’s tools to comment on any passage you have thoughts about.