Inside Metro

For an affluent Harvard University graduate with a knack for reasoning, it has to be a difficult pill to swallow. While he probably wouldn’t put it this way, Phil Bredesen is stumped.

During his six years as mayor, Bredesen has shown an incredible ability to master large projects. He convinced the community’s representatives in the Metro Council several years ago to merge Metro’s General Hospital with Meharry’s Hubbard Hospital. He is responsible for a football stadium rising out of the ground despite incredible public opposition. Even in the face of a critical school board and a skeptical teacher’s union, Bredesen has managed to bring about dramatic changes in curriculum and massive capital improvements for Metro schools.

What Bredesen hasn’t been able to do—and what no other city official can do either—is explain Nashville’s increasingly troubling crime statistics. The murder numbers are bad enough. With 102 victims already, this year is expected to become the city’s worst ever.

The high murder numbers to date can be partially explained by the fact that several cases involved multiple victims. But other violent crime figures cannot be so easily explained. According to figures from the Metro Police Department, aggravated assault has risen 38.5 percent since Bredesen took office in 1991. Robbery is up almost 10 percent since 1991. The only good news to report is that rape is down 5.3 percent for the same time period.

Of less concern to the safety of the local citizenry, but equally difficult to understand, is the dramatic rise in property crimes in Metro. Since 1991, auto theft has risen an incredible 114 percent, and larceny is up an alarming 52 percent. Again, in this category of crime, there is one nugget of good news: Burglaries are down 22 percent from 1991.

While criminologists across the country are trying to figure out why most cities are experiencing relief in these areas, Nashville officials are left spinning. Metro is clearly not part of the national trend toward reduced crime.

The Magnificent Dozen (or so)

Ten days ago, Bredesen announced an initiative to address what has quickly become the city’s most seized-upon issue. Saying he wanted a two-year plan to reduce violent crime in Nashville, Bredesen appointed a dozen Nashvillians to the “Commission of Twelve on Law Enforcement & Justice.” (Get the jury analogy?) Then he gave the group a chairman, John Seigenthaler, the former Tennessean publisher; he made the 13th member. Technically, there is even a 14th member because the mayor’s chief of staff, Christine Bradley, sits in as well.

Despite being spread somewhat thin with his various responsibilities in the community, Seigenthaler, who is founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, is well-qualified to lead the crime commission. For starters, the conference room table at the First Amendment Center, around which the crime commission is meeting, is so huge that it lends an almost imperial importance to the entire affair. More seriously, Seigenthaler’s work as chairman of the Commission on the Future of the Tennessee Judicial System gave him more than two years’ experience studying the weaknesses of the judicial system, something Bredesen wants his crime commission to do as well.

In fact, therein lies the mayor’s most prevailing theory about why the Nashville community is seeing violent crime on the rise. While neither he nor Metro Police Chief Emmett Turner can address the question with an absolute answer, particularly in the context of the opposite national trends, Bredesen believes the bureaucracy of the overall criminal justice system offers some clues.

“I think there is a very strong sense that we are falling down in the area of dealing with high-risk individuals in the community,” Bredesen says, pointing to Leon Fisher, the suspected drug dealer and murderer who was shot to death a couple of months ago while struggling with a police officer. Fisher’s shooting apparently ignited the arson of the Dollar General Store in Sam Levy Homes. It was then that Bredesen began asking himself what he should do to address violent crime in Nashville.

“What was this guy doing wandering around the community?” Bredesen wonders. “There are a lot of ideas about what needs to be done,” the mayor says. “What there isn’t at this point is a plan which would cut across all the people it needs to cut across. You’ve got the Police Department, which is part of the city government under my direction. You’ve got independently elected district attorneys and sheriffs and public defenders, all of whom constitute very independent energies in this whole equation.”

Most of the people serving with Seigenthaler on Bredesen’s crime commission are, in one way or another, intimately involved with the criminal justice system—people like Police Chief Emmett Turner, Sheriff Gayle Ray, Juvenile Court Judge Andy Shookhoff, Criminal Court Judge Cheryl Blackburn, and General Sessions Judge Leon Ruben. Public Defender Karl Dean and District Attorney Torry Johnson also serve.

Looking north

Just two days before Bredesen announced his crime commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released new statistics showing that serious reported crime in the United States was down 3 percent last year.

Further, the FBI reported, the Southern states had more serious crime than other regions of the country. Forty percent of the nation’s serious crimes took place in the South, compared to 24 percent in the West, 21 percent in the Midwest, and 15 percent in the Northeast. Further, crime was down in every region but one: the South.

At a meeting of the crime commission earlier this week, Police Chief Turner handed out packets showing the regional discrepancies, which left commission members scratching their heads. He acknowledged the larger numbers in the Southern region and the increase in crime in Nashville specifically, adding, “Why? I don’t know.”

Much has been made nationwide of the dramatic success New York City has had in reducing its levels of violent crime. Last year, midway into Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s first term, car theft was down 35 percent, robbery was down 30 percent, and burglary had declined 25 percent. Most impressively, the murder rate had plummeted almost 40 percent.

The results are credited in large part to more than 6,000 new police officers being added to the force before Giuliani took over. But he and the city’s police chief also developed innovative strategies to get tough on petty crimes, public drunks, and the notorious squeegee people who are constantly on the prowl to solicit money in exchange for a windshield cleaning. As policemen began tackling such public nuisances, the harsher crimes also fell.

Turner, for his part, credits Guiliani and the New York City police department for a job obviously well done. But he is quick to point out that his department doesn’t have the kind of resources New York City has been given. In fairness, Bredesen has consistently funded more police officers since he’s been in office, increasing the size of the force by almost 24 percent.

“When you have sufficient staffing, there are a lot of things you can do to reduce crime,” Turner told his fellow crime commission members while discussing the structure of the Metro Police Department earlier this week. “I wish we had that luxury here, but we don’t. New York City has over four officers per 1,000 people. I think we have about two, or a little over two, officers per 1,000 people.”

The worst offenders

While virtually everyone applauds the mayor for creating a crime commission, Bredesen has gotten some criticism for the makeup of the body, particularly for not having appointed members who deal with crime day after day.

“It seems to me he’s trying to make policy from the top down, and I don’t know if that’s been successful,” says at-large Metro Council member Leo Waters, who is otherwise complimentary of Bredesen’s idea to establish the commission.

Waters and others suggest the mayor should have appointed, for example, a community activist from one of the public-housing complexes. “That perspective is crucial to any policy-making on this issue,” Waters says.

But Bredesen’s choice of members, the mayor says, goes back to what he hopes to accomplish with the commission. He wants fundamental changes in the way the criminal justice system performs as a working unit. If the commission decides to suggest state legislation, for example, that would address the incredible gulf between the juvenile court system and the adult system, the juvenile court judge needs to be involved in the process.

“Part of the reason for the makeup of the commission is to involve those individuals who have to work together to make it happen,” Bredesen says. “What I was trying to do was to put people on the commission who had the ability to synthesize the information into a program for me. I don’t think the important thing for the commission is knowing firsthand the experience [so much] as it is being able to synthesize from what other people know firsthand into a strategy that we can actually use.”

Bredesen and the commission have already made at least some headway. After the Dollar General incident, Bredesen told the Scene that he was interested in compiling a list of people like Leon Fisher who have managed to evade the court system for so long. As he told his fellow commission members this week, Turner has done that. A list of 112 of the city’s worst and most frequent offenders now sits in the files of the police department.