Retired officer says US is ‘a different country’ than it was five years ago after wave of violent attacks on women

Five women have been attacked by strangers with criminal histories in Nashville, Tennessee, in the past three months, as FOX 17 Nashville first reported.

“We live in a different country than we lived in five, 10, 15 years ago than we lived in now,” Ken Alexandrow told Fox News Digital. Alexandrow is the founder of the tactical training company Agape and a veteran Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) officer who served three years on the FBI Violent Crimes Task Force.

The most recent attack was against 34-year-old Vanderbilt graduate Alyssa Lokits, who died after a stranger allegedly shot her while she was jogging on a sidewalk called Mill Creek Greenway in southeast Nashville.

MNPD officers arrested Paul Park, 29, of Brentwood, and charged him with murder less than 24 hours after Lokits was found dead on the tracks. Authorities have not identified a motive for the apparently random attack.

According to Williamson County court records obtained by Fox News Digital, Park had a criminal background with two prior offenses.

In 2017, Park was sentenced to probation as part of judicial diversion following a domestic violence arrest.

Subsequently, in 2018, Park was sentenced to 10 days in jail and supervised probation for violating his original probation sentence following his arrest for drug possession with intent to manufacture, deliver or sell. One of the three drug charges was ultimately dismissed as part of a plea agreement and Park pleaded guilty to the other two drug charges.

In August, two men with multiple perpetrators allegedly attacked four different women in completely separate incidents, FOX 17 first reported.

Jacob Harrison Thompson, 29, was charged with aggravated kidnapping, attempted aggravated rape and attempted rape in connection with the attacks of a 29-year-old woman on her car and a 30-year-old woman in a restroom. Both attacks took place in downtown Nashville.

Thompson was listed as homeless at the time of the two incidents. He previously received a five-year prison sentence for aggravated burglary in 2010 and a sixteen-year prison sentence for a particularly aggravated robbery in 2011.

The second suspect in the attacks on two other women in downtown Nashville, 27-year-old Deontez Drew, was listed as a registered sex offender at the time he allegedly attacked a 39-year-old and a 23-year-old woman. , both in the center, while the victims were walking.

Drew is said to have been armed with a knife and a baseball bat respectively during the two separate incidents.

“Those metrics and statistics are manipulated. The biggest reason is that less than half of police forces now actually report their first crimes,” Alexandrow said.

A 2023 White House report notes that “only 67% of law enforcement agencies have submitted crime data to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) as of January 1, 2023.”

The FBI also recently updated its 2022 crime statistics to show an increase in crime that year. As Fox News Digital previously reported, the FBI had initially recorded a 1.7% decline in violent crime two years ago, but updated those figures to show what was actually a 4.5% increase in violent crime in 2022.

“With the movements of people wanting to marginalize and minimize the police presence, well, that’s exactly what you get,” Alexandrow said. “And if you have people who want to film the police all the time… and get them fired for doing their job and doing their best, who wants to do this job? Who ultimately suffers from this? Well, the women in Nashville, the people in Nashville, the businesses in Nashville.”

He continued: “You ask (the police) to do a thankless job and you prosecute them and persecute them, in some cases, for doing their job, and then you’re angry that crime has increased. Well, we as a society have created this conflict. It’s an oxymoron.”

In cities like Nashville, jail overcrowding has become an issue that affects how and when certain offenders are released, Alexandrow said.

‘The only wrong word about prison is that it rehabilitates people, but that is not the case. It just makes you better at your job,” the 26-year-old MNPD officer said. “…There is no room in the prisons. So then they decide that this person is less violent than this person. So let’s release them and get double secret probation. And hopefully they are a good person. But we already know that’s not true.”

Alexandrow added that visitors can “have a great time in Nashville,” but as in other major cities, tourists should take extra caution and be aware of their surroundings.

Stepheny Price and Bradford Betz of Fox News contributed to this report.