Chief Ronal Serpas’ Plan for a Safer Nashville Is to Pull You Over Early and Often

Just after midnight, in the bowels of the Metro police complex, the DUI room is busy. This windowless cinder block sanctuary is no bigger than a child's bedroom, forcing a line of cops and suspected drunks to clog the hall.

Hank Stone slumps in a chair next to the Intoximeter, a rectangular hunk of machinery the approximate size of a printer. A battered baseball cap sits askew on his head with the words "Official Irish Drinking Team" stitched to the front. His eyes are bleary from crying in the back of a squad car.

Stone was found behind the wheel of his '85 Olds after running a red light at Trinity Lane and Gallatin Road. He'd collided with another driver, leaving pieces of shiny trim and shards of glass across the intersection. The other driver was taken to the hospital with minor injuries; Stone was taken here to blow into a long tube attached to the Intoximeter.

In a matter of minutes the machine will spit out a reading, telling the arresting officer if Stone is drunk. He employs the ubiquitous defense of drunk drivers everywhere. "I had one beer," Stone claims.

"Must have been a pretty big one," responds arresting officer Foster Hite.

Patrolman Sammy Johnson sticks his head in the door and laughs. "Lemme see your eyes," he says, examining Stone's watery peepers to gauge the degree of drunkenness. "Thirteen," Johnson announces, his guesstimate for how much over the .08 limit Stone will blow.

The Intoximeter beeps and a small screen begins to flash. It reads .122.

"Close!" Hite says to his colleague. But Johnson is already heading back to his squad car, where he will attempt to add to his tally of 140 DUI arrests this year.

These men compose ground zero in a concerted effort by Chief Ronal Serpas to change the way Nashville polices its citizens. Think of it as Tennessee's version of the broken window theory, made famous by New York City Police Commisioner William Bratton. The rationale was that if police focused on little things like graffiti and loitering, neighborhoods would be revitalized from the ground up. But in car-centric Nashville, it could be more accurately described as the broken taillight method.

It began in 2004, when Serpas was named chief. Cops began pulling over any driver who was even remotely in violation of traffic laws, hoping to find drunks, people with outstanding warrants, guns and drugs. The stops built a statistical base that is used to shape everything from staffing levels to which neighborhoods get the heaviest patrols.

Today, law enforcement peeks into the lives of tens of thousands of Nashvillians each year, looking into their eyes, peering into their cars and—in around 40 percent of cases—sending them on their way without a ticket.

Serpas says that the method has proven effective in fighting crime and reducing injury. "They've tripled the number of DUI arrests and they've reduced fatalities by 25 percent," says Kendell Poole, head of the Governor's Highway Safety Council, a federally funded office administered by the state.

But some officers say the focus on stops and stats keeps them from doing real policing.

For one weekend each month, almost every cop—regardless of rank or assignment —must put on a uniform and patrol. The initiative, called Mission One, has certainly boosted the department's traffic and DUI numbers. But it also pulls detectives away from more pressing cases like burglary and domestic assault, where the department faces overwhelming caseloads.

"Tickets bring in revenue and helping victims doesn't," says one officer who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We have to set aside our cases and investigations to make traffic stops. I don't see how that makes anyone safer."

In addition, there are legitimate civil liberties issues. Average Nashvillians are much more likely to be stopped by the police and have their car searched for little more than driving a few miles over the speed limit.

Which leads to the natural question: Is Serpas making Nashville safer, or creating a police state in the name of better stats?

By some measures, Nashville is safer than it was five years ago. Reported crimes have decreased in each of the four years that Serpas has served as chief. The burglary rate hasn't been this low since 1968; property crimes are at a 10-year minimum.

Serpas and others attribute the gains to increased traffic enforcement.

"Before I got here at the end of 2003, police officers in Nashville averaged about 2,020 traffic stops a week," the chief says. "Today we average between 5,500 and 6,000 traffic stops a week."

It's not by accident. Serpas pressures officers to make more and more stops each year. The strategy has yielded results. Deaths from alcohol-related accidents have plummeted, and there's been a nine-percent decrease in accidents overall.

The chief further argues that the stops aren't random. Enforcement is targeted to specific areas where accidents are highest, crimes are occurring and drunk drivers are most likely to be found. He tells his officers, "I don't need you fishing where the fishing is good. I don't need you doing the speed traps. I need you to be doing it where accidents are happening and where people are being hurt.... We want to know that [officers] are successful in quality stuff. Not just how many cars you stopped or arrest warrants you served. Did it make a difference? Did it reduce crime? Did it reduce fear of crime? Did it reduce calls for service? Did it reduce accidents with injuries?"