Country Star Opens Police Station Next to His Own Bar

Country music star Garth Brooks and his wife helped open a police station in Tennessee next to his own bar on Monday.

In November, Brooks partially opened his bar, Friends in Low Places Bar & Honky-Tonk, in Nashville's popular South Broadway District. The bar is set to fully open on March 7. While making plans to create his bar in 2022, Brooks expressed plans to team with city leadership to open a police substation to neighbor his bar, and by 2023, the substation was under construction.

On Monday, the Metro Nashville Police Department officially opened its doors of the Lower Broadway police substation next to Brooks' bar.

Brooks and his wife, Trisha Yearwood, financed the substation, which will provide resources for Metro police and Nashville Department of Transportation Multimodal Infrastructure to control traffic and safety in the bustling nightlife district.

Newsweek has reached out to Metro Nashville Police Department via email for comment.

The department announced the opening in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

"We try to ensure that we have enough officers down here to keep downtown safe," Chief of Police John Drake, who flipped the switch to light up the station's "POLICE" sign, said during the ceremony.

"And so we created an Entertainment District Unit, and it needed a place to be able to operate, a place they could call their own and not go to Central Precinct. They could have a substation that's all theirs."

The opening of the police station comes as violent crimes in city have increased from 2020 with 8,247 reported cased to 8,583 in 2021, according to the department, which collects and reports data for the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program and the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).

As of October 28, 2023, there had been 94 homicides reported in the Nashville and Davidson County, over a dozen more than at the start of the that month but two less than that time last year, according to WKRN in Nashville.

Brooks previously made headlines after he publicly declared his refusal to ban the sale of Bud Light in his soon-to-open bar following calls for a boycott of the product. Bud Light drew relentless criticism in April for a partnership it had with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

Brooks defended his decision last June while speaking with Billboard Executive Editor Melinda Newman at Billboard Country Live in Nashville and touched upon his Friends in Low Places Bar & Honky-Tonk.

"I know this sounds corny, I want it to be the Chick-fil-A of honky-tonks," he told Newman. "I want it to be a place you feel safe in. I want it to be a place where you feel like there are manners and people like one another."

Alluding to the Bud Light backlash, he added: "And yes, we're going to serve every brand of beer. We just are. It's not our decision to make. Our thing is this, if you [are let] into this house, love one another. If you're an a**hole, there are plenty of other places on lower Broadway."