A Nashville nonprofit focused on improving public safety is rolling out a new data dashboard intended to elevate Nashvillians’ conversations around safety.
The Nashville Police + Public Safety Alliance launched its public safety data dashboard on Sept. 11. It compiles crime data, sourced from the Metro Nashville Police Department, back to 2019 at thenashvillealliance.org/public-safety-data-dashboard.
“Our intention here is for this dashboard to be a tool that the community uses and embraces, and can come back to time and time again as a reliable source for the data, as a user-friendly way to read and understand and interpret the data,” Halim Genus, the alliance’s vice president of programs and partnerships, told The Tennessean.
Genus said the alliance plans to share the dashboard with local officials like Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell and the Metro Nashville Council, but it’s a tool he said is available to everyone in the county. Here’s a look at the information you’ll be able to find on the dashboard starting this week.
Crime data by type, neighborhood and trend
The dashboard’s broken up into several tabs where users can search for data in different formats. On the “crime explorer” tab, for example, you can select a neighborhood and a type of crime to see a breakdown of the reports per year — down to month-to-month changes — and how a neighborhood’s characteristics like race, poverty rate and the number of homeowners compare to Davidson County as a whole.
A ”trend explorer” tab further visualizes a neighborhood’s crime rates over time, charted in 12 different categories. Some outline a broader view of all property crime or violent crime over a selected time period, while others zoom in to look at more specific crimes like aggravated assault, homicide and auto theft.
Another tab shows comparisons by neighborhood, with the ability to sort by type of crime and over a certain time period.
As it stands, there’s just one section of the dashboard listed as coming soon: a compilation of residents’ “sentiments on safety.” That section will eventually play host to the results of the alliance’s annual public safety sentiment survey slated to be released later this fall. In the 2024 survey, 73% of respondents said they felt very or somewhat safe in Nashville personally, and 54% said Nashville was less safe than it was five years ago.
You won’t see the alliance providing any recommendations for how people should analyze the data, however. Genus said that’s by design.
“In fact, we see our job as providing the data and we see it as our responsibility if we’re going to be the source of the data to not provide an analysis or give any weight or perspective on the data,” Genus said. “We feel really strongly about that, but we do expect that folks will use our dashboard as a tool as they engage in robust conversations about public safety and make their own conclusions.”
The new tool comes amid heightened national scrutiny around violent crime numbers, colored by the state of affairs in Washington, D.C., where a month ago President Donald Trump ordered a police and military crackdown on crime. Some of Tennessee’s congressional Republicans have recently called for a similar deployment of National Guard troops to help fight crime in Nashville and Memphis.
O’Connell, for his part, has been regularly highlighting Nashville’s declining crime statistics at his weekly roundtable events with reporters. At his most recent roundtable on Sept. 5, O’Connell shared that crime numbers were on the decline in several categories — fatal shootings by nearly 31%, robberies by 25% and violent crime overall by 12%, to name several examples — through the first eight months of 2025 compared to last year.
Austin Hornbostel is the Metro reporter for The Tennessean. Have a question about local government you want an answer to? Reach him at ahornbostel@tennessean.com.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Public safety alliance launches Nashville crime stats dashboard