It doesn’t seem like a radical idea: an ordinance to prohibit Metro Police and Fire Department personnel from taking part in criminal hate groups or paramilitary gangs.

Would you trust a police officer or firefighter who had a swastika tattooed on his forearm?

And yet that sort of association does occur. The FBI’s 2015 Counterterrorism Policy Directive and Policy Guide states that “investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers.”

Not surprising, perhaps. Cops do tend to skew rightward, though most stop short of the far-right, dangerous fringe. Let’s hope.

The groups benefit from the specialized training and knowledge of officers, according to the language of the proposed ordinance. In Nashville? Maybe. Who knows? The ordinance would be a proactive move to guard against such an occurrence.

Speaking in support of the proposal at a Council meeting in September, Delishia Porterfield, member at large and a co-sponsor, said that Nashvillians need to know that they will get the same service from a police officer or a paramedic “regardless of whether there’s a blue sign in your yard or a red sign.”

Yes. We do.

And yet the proposal is now at least temporarily dead, withdrawn this month by the lead sponsor, Jeff Preptit, who represents District 25. “We still have so much more work to do,” Preptit said in prefacing his move.

That need for more work began to be evident in September when the proposal came up for a first reading, a normally routine event to pave the way for committee reviews and fine-tuning of legislation. Preptit presented a substitute ordinance, already heavily reworked from the original.

Jeff Eslick, who represents District 11, found it problematic. He mentioned the civic disturbances and unrest of 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which included smashed windows and fires set at the Metro Courthouse.

“Would that group be considered a hate group?” Eslick asked. “Who would be defining a hate group and who would be monitoring this?”

Preptit’s substitute ordinance included these definitions:

“‘Hate Group’ means any person or group that incites or provides material support for criminal acts or criminal conspiracies that promote violence toward racial, religious, ethnic, sexual, gender, or other groups or classes of individuals.”

“‘Paramilitary Gang’ means person or group that advocates the overthrow of the U.S. Government or any state, municipality, tribal, or other government by force or violence or any unlawful means.”

Eslick called the definitions “too broad,” and suggested that “we’re not all going to agree on what a hate group would be.”

His opposition notwithstanding, a voice vote gave initial approval. But since then the Public Health and Safety Committee has twice recommended deferrals for a second reading, culminating most recently in the withdrawal.

As it happens, I’ve seen a hate group represented in my own profession. Some years ago, a colleague of mine at a Jackson, Mississippi, newspaper wrote about a group of neo-Nazis active in the area. Only later did it come out that the leader of the group, who had been granted anonymity in the articles, was another colleague at the same newspaper. An editor on the copy desk.

He did not remain a colleague long, once that news came out. My bosses quite reasonably decided that membership – indeed, leadership – in such a group was at odds with our mission of providing the news without bias. Or at least without that much, and that kind of, bias.

Would he also have been fired for violating that mission had the group been less odious politically? Libertarians, say? I don’t know. I can say that respectable news organizations typically don’t want their newsroom employees actively engaged in partisan politics of any sort.

Is Eslick suggesting that police officers and such should have the right to engage with hate groups? That seems unlikely. But he’s right that views vary on which specific groups warrant that description.

Put simply: One person’s Proud Boys is another person’s Black Lives Matter.

Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville. He can be reached at [email protected]