NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Metro police officers say they are disturbed by a current police department practice.

Basically, some officers that are in trouble are forced to sit 8 hours a day, five days a week, in the lobby of the criminal justice center with nothing to do and you're picking up the tab. Some have been sitting there for months.

The spokesperson for the police department wouldn't talk to us on camera but says this practice has been going on for years.

"I don't want to ever have to sit there. Ever," said Danny Hale, the president of Nashville's Fraternal Order of Police.

Officers refer to it as the "Green Mile" after the movie about dead men walking.

"If you got put on the green mile, you were never coming back," said Hale.

These officers could lose their jobs but for now they sit. They've been stripped of their guns, their badges, and Hale would argue, stripped of their dignity.

"Basically, you cannot act as a law-enforcement officer and they know that and to top it all off they get put on display," said Hale.

The four decommissioned officers currently sitting in the lobby say they aren't allowed to talk to us on camera. One of them says that he's been sitting in the lobby since July with nothing to do, nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. Some officers are sitting here in limbo for months until their hearings.

‘My gosh. We've had people down there for a year," saidi Hale, "I think close to a year."

"I don't know what to think because it seems like to me they are punishing them before they actually prove what they're doing, which seems opposite to what the whole justice system is there for in the first place," said Nashville Resident Trent Notestine.

The police department insists this is not a punishment but an improvement from the times when decommissioned officers on the City payroll sat at home and got checked on by police but for the officers stuck in this limbo land, they tell FOX 17 they would rather be anywhere but there.

Hale says he's hoping the police chief will at least put them behind the lobby wall so they won't get stared at everyday but the officers tell FOX 17 they are looking for more than that. A few of them have lawyered-up and are seeking legal action against the department. (Copied from fox17 newssite at http://fox17.com/news/).

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