Who Will Hold the Police Accountable?
On an unseasonably warm February afternoon in 2017, Jocques Clemmons was driving through the James A. Cayce Homes, the largest public-housing complex in Nashville, when he rolled through a stop sign and into the parking lot of the building where his girlfriend and younger son lived. A big, affable father of two, he was 31 years old and, like most of the neighborhood’s residents, black.
Officer Joshua Lippert of the Metro Nashville Police Department had been watching the stop sign from his Chevy Impala, where he sat alone. The car was unmarked, but easily recognized as belonging to the department’s “flex” team. Unlike patrol officers, who respond to calls for service in a fixed geographic territory, flex officers primarily move between neighborhoods that have high crime rates, looking for misconduct and engaging on their own initiative. People in Cayce call them the “jump-out boys” for their proclivity to drive up abruptly on suspicious activity and make arrests. Like most Nashville cops, Lippert is white. He turned on his lights and followed Clemmons into the parking lot.
Clemmons’s mother, Sheila Clemmons Lee, a caregiver for the elderly and disabled, was feeding her charges lunch when her phone rang. It was Clemmons’s girlfriend, and she was screaming. At first, Lee could make out only a few words—police, shot. When she and her husband arrived at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Clemmons was in surgery. A detective approached and asked whether her son had an arrest record. Then a doctor came out and told her Clemmons had died.
“I need to see my son,” Lee recalls saying, but the detective barred the family from viewing the body, explaining that it had to be protected as evidence. By then, the police had tweeted notice that an officer had shot a “gunman” at Cayce Homes, accompanied by an image of a revolver. “This is his weapon,” the tweet read. Lee wouldn’t see her son’s body until a week later, at the funeral home.
In his first interview with an investigator the afternoon of the shooting, Lippert said that when he pulled up, Clemmons exited the car he had been driving and fled on foot, dropping a handgun as he tried to escape. Lippert said he tried to kick the gun away, but Clemmons managed to pick it up, and raised it in his direction. Lippert then shot him from about 10 feet away, hitting him once in the hip and twice in the back.
But there were ambiguities: The first officer to arrive after the shooting didn’t see a handgun on the scene—Lippert said he’d put it in his pocket to secure the area—and a subsequent lab analysis of the weapon found no identifiable prints or DNA linked to Clemmons.
Unlike the police departments of many neighboring cities, Nashville’s didn’t have dashboard or body cameras for most of its officers. Later that night, based on footage pulled from distant security cameras, the police announced that during the chase, Clemmons had “rushed and rammed Lippert”—though they would retract that account the following week, when footage from another camera came to light showing that the two had never collided. In their investigative files, the police referred to Clemmons as the “suspect” and Lippert as the “victim,” and they obtained a warrant to search Clemmons’s cellphone and social-media accounts. Lippert’s attorneys declined to comment on behalf of their client for this article. (Later, the district attorney announced that state law enforcement would take over this investigation and those of all future cases in which officer-involved use of force results in death.)
No one doubted that police face unique risks, but the apparent one-sidedness of the department’s account of the shooting felt to many like a provocation. Lee recalls thinking the police were “dehumanizing my son and painting a picture of him that’s not true.” A police spokesman said, by email, “In critical incidents, the MNPD works to disseminate accurate information to the community as expediently as possible to inform and negate any rumor or false information.”
Lee had raised Clemmons and his three younger sisters as a single mother, and even as a child, he was protective of her and the girls. Beginning when he was 7 or 8 years old, he worked at his grandparents’ fruit
