Metro Nashville Council Member Jeff Eslick joined Thursday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy to discuss the latest developments and work from the Metro Nashville Council, which convened for the first time in 2024 on Tuesday.
During Tuesday’s meeting, which Eslick said lasted for six hours, the Metro Council Public Health and Safety Committee voted to defer Resolution 2024-158, also known as the Fusus bill, which would continue and expand an existing program that allows businesses to voluntarily allow the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) to have access to the businesses’ exterior cameras in real time.
Eslick said the resolution, which was subject to public comment, was used by pro-Palestine protesters as a “cloak,” as individuals used the public comment period to speak on the current situation in the Middle East, specifically between Israeli and Hamas forces in Gaza.
“Just as the savage murder of George Floyd brought people into the streets, the barbarism we’ve been forced to witness in Gaza has been met with uprisings all over the world…In the silence and in the complicity with atrocity, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Free, free Palestine,” one man recited during the public comment period.
Another man requested the council to “pass a resolution in support of the people of Palestine.”
Despite being asked to keep their remarks “specific to the bill,” seven more individuals went on to speak on the topic of Palestine during the remainder of the public comment period.
Eslick told Leahy that the speakers were able to successfully use the public comment period to speak on the issue of Gaza by “grounding their argument or their speech with sentences or words that related to Fuses, but was an argument about Palestine.”
“And it’s going to happen again next week because [the resolution] was deferred, so it’s going to come back up next week,” Eslick added, calling the situation, “coordinated.”
In regards to the Fusus bill, Eslick said he will vote in favor of it because he thinks “any tool that we give our police officers to help fight crime is a good thing.”
“I’ll vote for it. First off, it’s already happening, so we’re not creating anything. It’s just renewing it and expanding. It’s giving them more money so that they can make the program bigger, better, and work more. I think any tool that we give our police officers to help fight crime is a good thing,” Eslick said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
