Photo: AlvineNearly 18 months ago, demonstrators walked into a Metro Council meeting and shut it down. They were calling for justice for Jocques Clemmons, the black man shot and killed by a white police officer in a Cayce Homes parking lot in February 2017, and they insisted that the council hear their demands. One of those was the creation of a community oversight board, a vehicle for civilians to participate in investigating and responding to the conduct of Metro Nashville police officers.

Yesterday — days after the fatal police shooting of another black man, Daniel Hambrick, by another white cop — a coalition of activists called Community Oversight Now, who have been organizing and canvasing the streets for months, walked into the same Metro Courthouse and submitted more than 8,200 petition signatures. The signatures must be verified, but that is far more than the 3,900 signatures needed to force a referendum in November that will decide whether civilian oversight of the police comes to Nashville.

The apparent success of the petition drive isn't quite the culmination of a fight that actually stretches back decades in Nashville, but it is a milestone for a movement that has been denied the support of many of the city's self-styled progressive leaders. Former Mayor Megan Barry withheld support for a community oversight board, following Metro Nashville Police Chief Steve Anderson's lead. Mayor David Briley has avoided taking a position on the issue. In January, a bill creating such a board was voted down by the Metro Council with only five members voting in support of it.

Even submitting their signatures turned out to take a bit of a fight. A bizarre scene played out at the courthouse Wednesday as Metro Clerk Elizabeth Waites appeared either unavailable or unwilling to sign a form acknowledging receipt of the petitions. A deputy clerk said office protocol prohibited her from signing, but Metro law director Jon Cooper eventually told her to sign in Waites' place. The situation seemed resolved until activists realized the date stamped on the form was July 32. They quickly got that corrected.

You can hardly blame members of the group, particularly Sheila Clemmons Lee — Clemmons' mother, who carried the box of petitions into the courthouse yesterday — for feeling skeptical about the whole ordeal. Lee's insistence on justice for her son and increased accountability for police has been relentless in the face of repeated slights. The man who shot and killed her son, Officer Josh Lippert, remains on the force, albeit not working on the street. After sitting outside the MNPD's East Precinct for months demanding Lippert's firing and requesting a meeting with Anderson, she was mostly ignored, and when she sent a letter to the chief, and received an unsatisfactory letter in response, she and a group of supporters went to the MNPD headquarters in person only to find themselves in a standoff with the building's private owner. She and her family had to file suit just to get Clemmons' phone back from law enforcement.

At the very least, yesterday's fiasco was only the latest in a long series of them, almost all of which could have been easily avoided by Metro.

Assuming the signatures are verified, Community Oversight Now's proposed legislation will be put before voters on the Nov. 6 ballot. After a year-and-a-half of sustained activism on this issue, the coalition cleared a major hurdle yesterday. But the biggest one is still to come.



