Talk to anyone about Nashville Police Chief Ronal Serpas, and you’re likely to hear some loud opinions. He’s a crime-fighting bulldog. He’s a self-righteous bully. He’s a smart student of sociology who uses academic research in the service of community policing. He’s a political power-wielder armed with audits and statistics designed only to make him look good. “What’s the most dangerous place to be in Nashville?” goes a joke currently making the rounds in crime-fighting circles. “Between Ron Serpas and a TV camera.” Talk to anyone about Nashville Police Chief Ronal Serpas, and you’re likely to hear some loud opinions. He’s a crime-fighting bulldog. He’s a self-righteous bully. He’s a smart student of sociology who uses academic research in the service of community policing. He’s a political power-wielder armed with audits and statistics designed only to make him look good. “What’s the most dangerous place to be in Nashville?” goes a joke currently making the rounds in crime-fighting circles. “Between Ron Serpas and a TV camera.” That last one—or at least the reality it reflects—is about the only point the chief’s critics and defenders seem to agree on. The guy is not quiet. He makes public appearances all over town, holds press conferences at the drop of a hat, speaks in pithy, TV-ready sound bites and never holds back when he could instead hold forth. Of course, to some folks, that means Serpas is open and accountable to the citizens he serves, a no-bullshit, no-prisoners kind of guy who’s not hiding behind the mayor’s coattails or cowering before the FOP. To others, he’s a “media whore”—in the words of a countywide elected official—who’s all too happy to take credit whether or not it’s due, to invent and trumpet successes on paper that don’t exist in reality. To say Serpas is a lightning rod within and around his department would be an understatement. But until recently, the little public criticism he endured didn’t seem to stick, both by virtue of the revolving news cycle and his willingness to deal publicly with whatever issue and move on. Traffic tickets, Tasers, surveillance cameras, the disbandment of the cold case unit, a zealous vice squad that used questionable tactics (and was forced by the district attorney’s office to cease them) and, yes, a serial burglar who stalked the streets of West Nashville—publicly, at least, Serpas seemed to emerge from all skirmishes unscathed. How could you criticize a guy who attends community meetings, talks to people about their neighborhood’s crime problems and then tries to retool his department to solve them? But in private—within the Nashville justice system—the chief has made a lot of enemies. Officers and others chafe at his brash style and resent what they see as heavy-handed changes made on his brief watch. Many cops, who will only agree to talk to the Scene if the newspaper withholds their names because they fear retaliation, feel that they’re overworked and undersupported, expected to write traffic tickets at such a pace that they can’t do meaningful community patrol work. The acrimony has reached such a level that two unions—the Fraternal Order of Police and the Teamsters—are currently maneuvering to outflank each other with petitions and press releases in the political war against Chief Serpas. Whichever group stands up stronger to the tall, jowly chief may end up representing the department’s rank-and-file. With uncomfortably high violent crime rates in the headlines, an ongoing investigation into the death of a young man who had been Tasered, pepper sprayed and beaten in police custody, and against the backdrop of an ugly union organizing campaign, Serpas’ reforms are drawing closer scrutiny these days. Are his changes making Nashville the “safest big city in America,” as he promised they would when he took office a year and nine months ago? Is his unapologetic leadership style an asset or a liability (or more likely, both)? Is Serpas making Nashville safer or just playing politics with the police department? There are two storylines on Chief Serpas. In one version, he’s the well-educated, experienced “change agent” who’s presided over two successful departmental restructurings—one with the New Orleans Police Department and one with the Washington State Patrol—and comes to town looking to get things done. Of course, change agents are by their very nature divisive, so he may ruffle a few feathers and hasten a few retirements as he makes the police department more responsive to citizens’ needs. You don’t reform an entrenched police bureaucracy by running for homecoming queen. The second storyline isn’t so flattering. According to that narrative, Serpas is a stat-padding con artist who makes a name for himself from inflated or deflated numbers—whichever suits the political circumstances—and retaliates against anyone who questions his judgment or talks out of school. He cares first and foremost about his profile in the community, they say, and will do anything to keep his approval rating high. He’ll make impressive short-term changes in Nashville and be gone to bigger and better departments before Nashville’s numbers implode on themselves. It’s community-minded savior vs. career-minded carpetbagger. And of course, neither caricature is quite right. Ronal Serpas, like high-profile civic leaders everywhere, is a mixture of self-promotion and crime prevention: he’s smart, confident and charismatic—even his strongest detractors report a desire to drink beer with him—and by most accounts he’s trying to do his job well. But at the end of the day, he knows who pays his salary (hint: it’s not rank-and-file cops) and aims his reforms to keep them happy and feeling safe, with an emphasis on the “feeling” part. That’s right, folks: the police chief is a politician. Nowadays, in the post-good-old-boy era, political leaders don’t gain their legitimacy by placating typical power brokers like mob bosses and business tycoons. In modern times, “results-oriented” public servants appeal to the almighty alchemy of audits and statistics. In the name of accountability, they provide “metrics” by which they’ll be judged, crucibles in which they are tested. Ronal Serpas is chief among this new breed of public servant, so for starters, you have to understand that he is all about numbers. Crime rates, traffic citations, pounds of drugs seized, citizen complaints, recruitment levels, officer suspension days—all routine information that can be found, in some form or another, buried in dusty police files. But Serpas throws around less conventional numbers, too: polling data that indicate nationwide trends in demographics and attitudes about a host of issues, as well as the results of a local survey he commissioned about his department’s performance. Let’s take the police metrics first. The man loves them: he records, plots and analyzes data almost compulsively, making the collection and utilization of statistical data the main hallmark of his administration and, indeed, of his leadership style. Every Friday, he and his precinct commanders, along with dozens of senior officers, gather in a North Precinct community room to gaze at an electronic map of Nashville on which instances of crime are displayed for discussion. They look at trends and monitor hotspots where crime is spiking. The program, pioneered in New York City and implemented in departments across the country, is called CompStat; the theory behind it is that commanders should know what’s going on in their respective precincts and police them accordingly. “Every Friday we refocus the agency on what it is we need to do, where we’re gonna go, how we’re gonna get there,” Serpas says during a two-and-a-half-hour interview with the Scene in his conference room. “We make changes in the strategy as appropriate; we don’t have a cookie-cutter approach.” Nashville is in phase one of CompStat. (More than one officer on the street refers to it derisively as CompScam.) Serpas says phase two has something to do with an “accountability-driven leadership model” that the feds just singled out for praise in his former Washington State Patrol department. CompStat is a politically popular program in cities across the country, although it has been the subject of numbers-fudging scandals in New York, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Atlanta. And then there’s the chief’s propensity for polls. He has a taxpayer-funded $95-a-year subscription to Gallup polling service that provides him with data on Americans’ attitudes, habits and proclivities—data he marshals in the service of political arguments. (Serpas reportedly knows the numbers on public attitudes toward police officers vs. their attitudes toward journalists.) “He had all these cross-referenced numbers,” says one Metro official, amazed and bewildered at the breadth of the chief’s trivial knowledge. “He just seemed to study polls.” He also commissions them. As in $140,000 worth of polling to be conducted over the next five years by an Oklahoma-based research firm. Paid for by drug seizure money, the public opinion surveys ask 400 Nashvillians with telephones and 400 business respondents how the department is doing in a variety of areas and about Serpas’ performance in particular. Good news: 73 percent of local adults and 76 percent of local businesses say he is personally doing a good or excellent job. Asked if this kind of polling isn’t what elections are for—you know, people who don’t like Purcell’s police chief won’t vote for Purcell, and other such democratic formalities—Serpas is characteristically unequivocal. “No, no, no—I don’t agree with that at all. The reason I do it is to make sure on a global scale, we have some continuity with the community,” he says, arguing that poll data uses “scientific methodology” that far outpaces his ability to gather information anecdotally. (Not that the poll is bias-free: it skewed 81 percent white, found no respondents in nine ZIP codes, including all of downtown, and overlooked people without home phones.) “In other words, the survey is a tool to help us better align our priorities with that of the people we serve. Nothing more, nothing less,” says Serpas. “That’s what it’s about.” One local law enforcement veteran says that polling bankrolled by seized drug money was new to him. “I just found that amazing,” he says. “I’ve never heard of it, I’ve never heard of anyone else who’s heard of it. I thought police departments were supposed to use that money to get drugs off the streets.” Surely some percentage of Nashvillians would agree, though that question isn’t one his polling has posed. One local law enforcement veteran says that polling bankrolled by seized drug money was new to him. “I just found that amazing,” he says. “I’ve never heard of it, I’ve never heard of anyone else who’s heard of it. I thought police departments were supposed to use that money to get drugs off the streets.” Surely some percentage of Nashvillians would agree, though that question isn’t one his polling has posed. Perception is reality, as Serpas readily acknowledges, and he lives and dies by the numbers. So when he sat down to talk with the Scene last week, he came armed with a two-page handout. Yes, homicides, robberies and aggravated assaults—violent crimes—haven risen alarmingly so far this year, but on the flip side, gun and drug seizures are up, fatal and non-fatal accidents are down and citizen complaints and departmental suspensions are lower too. Serpas boasts that since he came on the job in January 2004, 173 officers have resigned, retired (the department offered generous retirement incentives during budget crunch time) or been terminated, and even short-handed, his police force is improving many of its statistics. “The story is that the cops who are here are workin’ hard,” he says. “The police officers worked in ’04 harder than they did in ’03 in dramatic and demonstrable ways. In ’05, they’re surpassing that—and there’s less of ’em on task. And less of ’em on task are getting fewer complaints.” Serpas cites statistic after statistic—a 16 percent increase in neighborhood watch groups formed in 2004 and “about 30-35 more over that this year”; “for every 100 people we arrest, about 1.5 of them fight”; Nashville has 533 square miles to police with 1,243 officers. Boston, a city with only 46 miles to police, has the same crime rate and same population as Nashville and nearly 2,100 cops. He cites stats on Atlanta, too—all off the top of his head. “Look at the numbers,” he says. “The data is unrelenting.” It’s an understatement. But what does all that data mean? Are there other ways to cut the numbers that aren’t quite so flattering to the department? Many people who work inside and around the Metro police department describe institutional pressures that keep stats in check. In an oft-cited example, multiple justice system sources describe a hypothetical burglary in which the prowler gets scared in the middle of the act and runs off without taking anything. They say an officer responding to that call is increasingly likely to record it as vandalism or trespassing rather than the more serious, federally tracked crime of burglary. “I’m not confident in those numbers, really,” says Verna Wyatt, a Bredesen-appointed member of the state Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) commission, who has criticized the chief in the past. “They’re not really changing the number. They’re just reporting it another way so it looks better. That’s what I’ve been told.” For his part, Serpas says he’s confident that doesn’t happen because he has three levels of audit in place. Level one consists of police captains who randomly call back dozens of crime victims a month to double-check that the police incident report matches the incident, which the chief says it does 99.7 percent of the time. Level two, says Serpas, is statistical analysis done downtown by the crime analysis unit. He contends that this audit is free of bias because the team answers to central administrators and not to precinct commanders looking to polish crime numbers. (Of course, this overlooks the possibility that the department’s main leadership would try to manipulate its numbers.) Level three, dubiously enough, is the field poll. “I am of the opinion from talking to my contemporaries and being one of the longest, if not the longest ongoing practitioner of CompStat in the United States of America, that our audit systems are far ahead of anybody else in the country,” boasts the chief. “And we’ll stand ‘em up to anybody who wants to see ’em.” Citing another statistic, he says the MNPD added 423 Type I’s this year—referring to a federal crime category—after discovering errors in the record room. “We added crimes that other people would have ignored,” he stresses. Sometimes names will stay the same but department functions will quietly change. Serpas prompted a round of law-and-order infighting earlier this year when he moved to kill homicide’s cold case unit, a collaborative effort between police and the district attorney’s office. Unfortunately, he forgot to tell the DA’s office, and the two branches of law enforcement got into their second public skirmish in as many months. Police and prosecutors worked their disagreements out enough to be civil—Serpas and District Attorney Torry Johnson eat lunch together more regularly these days—and the cold case unit is back, sort of. Rather than investigating crimes that are at least three years old, the unit now follows up cases that are one year old. Cases, it seems, get cold faster. Which means the cold case unit is qualitatively different than it used to be, and arguably better-looking on paper. Many of these changes stem from Serpas’ efforts to decentralize the police department, a well-intentioned philosophy that’s been implemented about as smoothly as a prostate exam. “Generally, the concept of moving things out to the precincts, giving the precinct commanders more resources at their disposal to handle problems in the precinct and making them the point person for community folks in that precinct makes a great deal of sense,” says Johnson, the DA. “Like a lot of things, the devil’s in the details.” Johnson and others in the DA’s office describe the coordination difficulties of decentralized homicide and robbery units: if one person commits crimes in more than one precinct, for example, multiple detectives would handle the case, which creates communication problems and other inefficiencies. “[Decentralization] raises questions, it raises issues, and we’ve been working with the department to come up with some solutions to problems,” Johnson says. “It’s too early to say if it’s a bad idea or not; we’ll just have to wait and see.” Johnson says Serpas has been increasingly willing to discuss problems that have arisen from his decentralization program. Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall reports that his department and the police under Serpas have collaborated well together—although he was skeptical at first. “One of the things that Serpas has done right off the bat is energize parts of the department that weren’t very energized before,” he says, noting that the two departments work together more on serving warrants than they used to—freeing up Metro cops for street duty. When the new chief first arrived last year, though, Hall says he was worried about what he perceived as indifference to the downstream effects of heightened enforcement efforts. “I was concerned early on when Chief Serpas arrived and said jail overcrowding and court overcrowding aren’t his problems,” Hall says. “I just remember thinking, ‘Wow, this guy—he’s gonna have to find a way to work with folks.’ ” But Hall says that since then, his collaborations with the chief have been smooth and fruitful. If his colleagues’ support is somewhat qualified, his boss backs him 100 percent—and that’s a serious degree of commitment from Mayor Bill Purcell. “This is a department that is prepared to present the truth, whichever way it goes,” says the mayor, noting that he has never had trouble getting what he feels are accurate statistics from the department under Serpas. (Does the chief count Purcell’s eagle-eyed oversight as a fourth layer of audit?) Purcell, who calls CompStat “the single most important police innovation of recent years,” says that the chief has put a lot of pressure on his department in the past year-and-a-half, but that ultimately the rank-and-file support the chief’s changes. “In my experience, there is a greater understanding [today] that this is a chief who knows what he’s talking about and where the department is heading,” Purcell says, noting that cops have never felt sheepish about telling him how they really feel. He says officers know they’re supported, the DA’s office gets along better with the chief and Serpas is eagerly tackling the crime problems facing the city. Purcell, himself a politician who trades in management audits and minute details, seems pleased with his selection almost two years into the guy’s tenure. And frankly, so do neighborhood groups. “Serpas has been at dozens and dozens of neighborhood-based meetings since he’s been in town, and one thing that comes through is a sincere desire to help make things better, as well as the ability to communicate with people at all levels,” says John Stern, chairman of the Nashville Neighborhood Alliance. And it’s true: the chief knows how to talk to engaged neighborhood residents and churchgoers, West Nashville, North Nashville, black, white or Hispanic. He’s a funny, engaging guy who can go from tough know-it-all cop to class clown in a heartbeat. Mike Jameson, a Metro Council member who represents part of East Nashville—where concerned citizens roam the streets and listservs like suburban commandos in search of armed conflict—says that in his constituents’ eyes, Serpas can do no wrong. “He could walk in the room and bite the head off a kitten, and the neighborhood groups would still give him a standing ovation,” Jameson says colorfully, if a bit disturbingly. It’s the kind of political capital (though not the furry aftertaste) even Purcell must admire: Serpas is somehow a stern disciplinarian and strident manager who’s nonetheless fun to cut up with. Show people lower crime numbers—give them the feeling of safety, as the chief says—and they’ll love you. But Stern, on behalf of the neighborhood alliance, isn’t giving any standing O’s yet. The groups like Serpas’ data-driven policing and they appreciate his community outreach efforts—but they want to see how long the relationship-building will last and if the disturbing rise in violent crime numbers will improve. “He’s a great guy, a great communicator, and he’s got excellent motivational skills,” Stern says. “But in the end, results do matter, and it’s too early to tell in this case.” Not so for the Teamsters, who are currently challenging the FOP’s status as a police union, essentially on the grounds that they don’t stand up enough to what the Teamsters see as a bully police chief. It’s a political fight, to be sure, but it may also serve as the best referendum to date on Serpas’ standing with his staff. This data display was prompted by a question about widespread reports of low morale in the Metro Police Department. Serpas dismisses those reports, and he’s happy to explain why. “You don’t come to work if you’re miserable and work harder than you did the day before,” he says, brandishing the department’s positive numbers and overlooking the negative ones. “They’ve been inspired at some level. Our precinct commanders are doing a tremendous job of inspiring people…. So as we assess morale, we look at the outcomes of what happens: citizens’ complaints are going down, police officers’ individual activity is going through the roof. There’s a good chance that they’re fairly satisfied with their work environment because they’re working harder than they were before.” The chief’s not worried. Long after the Scene’s tape ran out, he said that unions always seek to attract members by vilifying the boss, so he doesn’t take it personally, nor does he see it as an accurate gauge of his leadership within the department. In fact, Serpas has stats on this, too—sort of. He provided the Scene with trusty Gallup polling data (“It’s right here, brother: Gallup!” he preached) to suggest that 14 percent of American workers, when surveyed since 1989, register some degree of dissatisfaction with their jobs, and in a recent poll, 3 percent labeled themselves “completely dissatisfied.” This data display was prompted by a question about widespread reports of low morale in the Metro Police Department. Serpas dismisses those reports, and he’s happy to explain why. “You don’t come to work if you’re miserable and work harder than you did the day before,” he says, brandishing the department’s positive numbers and overlooking the negative ones. “They’ve been inspired at some level. Our precinct commanders are doing a tremendous job of inspiring people…. So as we assess morale, we look at the outcomes of what happens: citizens’ complaints are going down, police officers’ individual activity is going through the roof. There’s a good chance that they’re fairly satisfied with their work environment because they’re working harder than they were before.” The chief continues, posing one of his trademark rhetorical questions à la Donald Rumsfeld. “Is there a piece of this organization that’s mad as hell? Absolutely. But that’s anywhere in America. We try to conscript those people into the fight, try to bring them back into the battle about making Nashville the safest big city in America. I believe as a leader my first duty is to try and get this 14 percent re-engaged. “But I’ll be deadly honest wichoo,” he goes on. “If they don’t get engaged, we need to try and figure out how to get them out of the workforce.” Serpas calls the most hardcore of his dissatisfied employees “three percenters”—not that he has any real proof what percentage of his workforce would identify itself as “completely dissatisfied”—and says he won’t let them poison his organization. They’re just threatened by change. At-large Metro Council member Buck Dozier chairs Metro’s public safety committee, in front of which Serpas was scheduled to appear Tuesday afternoon to discuss the department’s use of Tasers. A former Nashville fire chief and periodic Purcell critic, Dozier’s name gets circulated among rank-and-file cops as a mayoral candidate they could potentially support. In a phone interview with the Scene, Dozier refuses to take the politics bait overtly but makes it clear that the police department’s morale problems are on his radar. “I think the chief’s management style is a concern for some people,” he says diplomatically, noting that he hasn’t had an opportunity yet to study the department in great depth. Dozier says the chief’s greatest strength is his ability to communicate articulately; his greatest weakness, he speculates, may be “his ability to garner support among his own troops.” In the coming months, Dozier says, his committee may scrutinize the police department more carefully—“especially if the statistics on major crime keep rising.” Of course, the morale issue is one of the most vexing questions facing the department today. Cops of all ranks express serious reservations about the chief’s leadership, but many won’t do more than tacitly make it known. (One patrolman the Scene interviewed looked both ways, then sealed his lips with an imaginary key. A high-ranking officer with plans to retire chuckled, suggesting we contact him in a couple of years. A non-police New Orleans resident called his uncle, a former detective in the Big Easy, to reminisce about “Ronnie Serpas, the ass-kisser.”) Only one out of the many police officers the Scene talked with defended the department’s current direction. You’d think the data-driven chief could commission a poll to find out what percentage of his officers are so-called three percenters—that is, if he really wants to find out. After all, as he pointed out, when police have low morale, it endangers everyone. For now, though, Metro’s police chief and the department he’s shaking up for better and worse proceed along with reams of data and unclear amounts of genuinely useful information. No simple explanation of Serpas’ style and substance can tell the whole story. The crimes that have risen in Nashville have also spiked in cities around the country—Milwaukee, Charlotte, Kansas City—but not to the same degree: Nashville is ranked second among 15 peer cities (among them Washington, Atlanta and Memphis, along with the aforementioned) for its huge percentage change (up 63 percent) in the murder rate. Disgruntled officers here certainly include some tenured change-haters, but also some great cops who are undisputed assets to the department. “I’ve never heard such poor morale—so much open complaining—in all my years in Nashville,” says one veteran of the DA’s office, echoing a common theme. It’s not just the slackers who are pissed off. Serpas is smart, but he’s also verbally trigger-happy, tending to shoot first and ask questions later. He came to Nashville and promptly held a press conference declaring that the search for missing teenager Tabitha Tuders—which had earned his predecessor widespread criticism—would be his department’s No. 1 case. Nearly two years later, that case remains unsolved. (In April, it will qualify for old-school cold case status: unsolved after three years.) So the department’s No. 1 case remains unsolved, and its No. 1 mission—reducing violent crime—isn’t going so well either. It bears repeating what happened to the last data-driven, high-profile change agent who came to town. His name was Pedro Garcia. He was put in charge of the school system, and though he didn’t have the same political skill that Serpas does, he made big statistical promises and took no prisoners. Along the way, he alienated many of his rank-and-file principals and teachers. Early on, Garcia’s numbers looked good. But as time has passed and short-term gains were eclipsed by the hard slog of years two, three and four, community support for the schools director has eroded. His fate with Metro schools hangs in the balance. It hasn’t been pretty to watch. Serpas is popular with the community and supported by the mayor, but the numbers in year two already are less impressive than the quick gains of year one—and some of them are simply alarming. The police department is a smaller beast than schools, but it deals with matters of life and death. Serpas’ detractors complain about low morale and ticket-writing strategies that undermine their ability to do other important police work. “The three percenters will try to spin that into everything under the sun, but all this data I gave you crushes that,” the chief says. He can only hope the data doesn’t crush him, too.