| Serpas, 50, has done this dance with data for roughly 15 years. He has improved on this core principle, adding new layers and measurement tools that emphasize quality, not necessarily quantity. And he and his commanders credit it with reducing reported crimes in New Orleans, in Washington state and during a six-year stretch in Nashville.
Last week, the New Orleans native and third-generation cop left the top policing job in a recently flooded city for one that's in even more distress.
In Nashville, residents had an overwhelmingly positive view of the police, with surveys showing an 85 percent satisfaction rate. In New Orleans, a city half Nashville's size that has more than twice its number of homicides, Serpas is a familiar face in a department crying out for renewal. It will be up to him to try and quell an epidemic of violence and restore the luster to an agency that seems to have lost its way.
Faith in Comstat
On a January morning in 2004, Serpas was sworn in as chief of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department. He peppered his speech with imperatives. He vowed to a crowd of 600-plus people that violent crime WILL go down, that criminals who terrorize the community WILL be brought to justice. He pledged that his police force WILL be accessible, open and accountable. He introduced "accountability-driven leadership."
His mentor, the man who helped introduce such management jargon into Serpas' vocabulary, was looking on. Richard Pennington, the former NOPD superintendent and then chief in Atlanta, had heard this before. He and Serpas had instilled the same basic philosophy a decade earlier in New Orleans, with positive results.
The strategy -- variously called Comstat or Compstat -- uses computerized maps and reams of crime data. Police managers study and analyze the maps, looking for clusters or trends. Data is king.
How the data is used is largely up to district commanders, who are given wide latitude to determine deployment tactics. But they are also held accountable for spikes in crime stats or drops in arrest numbers.
The strategy was developed in New York in the early 1990s and brought to New Orleans a few years later by a renowned crime consultant. Pennington adopted it and dug in.
Under Pennington and Serpas, murder tallies in New Orleans dropped, and crime statistics nose-dived. Comstat was credited. Pennington and politicians rejoiced.
'Crooks don't ride horses, they drive cars'
Nashville is a bicycle wheel of a city. A bevy of diagonal byways emanate from the center and lead to more multilane highways. Downtown, the cops walk the main drag and shoot the breeze with the barkers who summon tourists with promises of "real country music inside."
Several miles to the north, the sidewalks aren't as clean, cops are in cruisers, and traffic enforcement is common. Serpas greatly increased the number of traffic stops in high-crime areas, most of which are largely black and impoverished. Statistics show that about 25 percent of the department's arrests were made via traffic stops.
Don Aaron, the Nashville Police Department spokesman, noted that most motorists received only warnings. Aaron said Serpas has a one-liner for critics of the stops: "Crooks don't ride horses, they drive cars." Another oft-quoted Serpas line: "You don't hear of any walk-by shootings, do you?"
Others saw the tactic as racial profiling.
It's called 'driving while black,' " said Nashville community activist Keith Caldwell, who said he has been stopped five times in the past month. "In other neighborhoods they call it good policing."
Serpas said traffic enforcement is one of many policing tools, though he does not know to what extent he'll use that in New Orleans. He said studies found no evidence of racial profiling in his agency.
Tougher traffic enforcement wasn't the only new tactic Serpas brought to Nashville. He also decentralized the agency and instituted "accountability-driven leadership," a style that builds on Comstat.
"What gets measured gets managed; what gets managed gets better," Serpas said Friday in New Orleans.
He put resources in each of the city's six precincts and forced the commanders to run each one as his or her own fiefdom. Instead of one homicide unit, he spread investigators out among the precincts. Those same investigators would also probe thefts, burglaries and robberies in their area. Though critics say the move weakened the quality of homicide cases, others say it gives detectives a broader skill set.
"It was a big change for everyone," said Commander Michael Alexander, head of the South Precinct. "For those people who worked hard, it wasn't a problem. It gives everyone in the department ownership of your area. You are looking at and formulating hot spots. From a cop perspective, you need to know what's going on in those areas. It's a huge move away from sending out the officers and saying 'go work.' "
Alexander, a 20-year police veteran, never used to talk about "data points" or "map overlays." But policing has changed, and so has he. Now officers are taught to be smarter, faster, more effective.
Serpas, who arrived in Nashville with a Blackberry, got them for all his managers. Soon they were required to send out daily crime maps. Serpas wanted updates on every violent crime, Alexander said. Residents would e-mail the chief and the commanders. They would get responses back.
Serpas also wanted community members to sit in on Comstat meetings and receive routine e-mail updates full of data. He instituted these same changes just days into his new job in New Orleans.
In coming weeks, he plans to assess the NOPD's ties with neighborhood groups.
"We want to look at every one of those relationships and rekindle them if they are not robust, as well as expand them," Serpas said. "That's where we sell our trade, that's where do our work, that's where we sit down with people and say, 'What's really going on?' "
Three years ago, Jonathan Gilligan moved into a west Nashville neighborhood that had a fair share of "data points" on its crime maps. Now he runs a neighborhood watch program, one of nearly 500 in the city, a number that has doubled during the Serpas administration. When a block captain sees or senses something awry, he or she e-mails Gilligan, who e-mails his precinct liaison.
"The officers on patrol and the sergeants seem to have more involvement,," Gilligan said. "It's not just about waiting 'til crimes happen. We have a sergeant who gets to know the kids before they group up and become problems. We see a lot of officers who volunteer in the community and try and build better ties.
"There is more ownership of a community," Gilligan added. "What we hear from the lieutenants and the captain at the community meetings is that if the residents aren't happy, they hear it from their boss."
Some skepticism, some anger
Though Serpas and his data-heavy style has broad support in Nashville, the same tactics have drawn the skepticism of some politicians and the ire of some officers. "There are concerns of the crime reporting both inside and outside the department," said Councilman Joe Gotto. "I don't know whether the numbers are right or wrong. I just want someone to look at them closer."
Gotto acknowledged that the numbers may not matter much. "Hey, the community really likes him," he said. "They feel pretty safe."
A study released last month by the Nashville Fraternal Order of Police showed that officers had low morale and didn't feel Serpas was communicating well with his subordinates. Many had grown weary of what they viewed as a data marathon.
"On some level, you feel like you are getting this message that if numbers are down in one category, you've got to pick them up," said Sgt. Robert Weaver, Fraternal Order of Police spokesman. "If you are working eight hours, you need to deliver a product. But when you are told that what you did yesterday was great, but you need to do more today, that can wear on officers. The feeling among officers is that we were at an up-tempo, a sprint, and that we couldn't always keep up."
Serpas criticized the survey because only one-third of the association participated. He pledged to have the police force do its own larger survey that would nail down the points of dissatisfaction.
'Very, very confident'
Serpas has certain qualities no one disputes. Of the dozen-plus colleagues and associates interviewed for this story, all called him confident. Many called him "very, very confident."
He has stories, facts, anecdotes always at the ready. He is principled, and always keenly aware he is the police chief, several said.
Early in his tenure, Serpas faced a tough hurdle. His son was arrested by Nashville police on a charge of drunken driving. Serpas' response to learning the news: "Book him." Months later, his son was arrested again, same charge. Serpas held steady. "Book him," he told his officers again, according to The Tennessean newspaper.
Smart is another term affixed to Serpas. It's a title he worked hard to earn. In what is now a well-known narrative, Serpas dropped out of high school to marry his pregnant girlfriend, earned his GED, and later joined the NOPD in 1980.
He became the NOPD's youngest sergeant at 24, its youngest lieutenant at 28, and in 1990, at 29, the youngest captain. That same year, he became the youngest major. He was boyish, brash and unabashed in his ambitions.
"I want to be chief one day," he told The Times-Picayune in 1990. "I'm not afraid to admit it."
As he rose through the ranks, Serpas earned an undergraduate degree, a master's in business administration, and later, a doctorate in urban studies from the University of New Orleans.
Then came another big break.
In 1996, Pennington drastically reorganized the department, decentralizing units, moving commanders and emphasizing statistics, The move made the No. 2 spot more powerful than it had ever been. Enter Serpas, the high-school dropout with a doctorate.
Though near the top of the NOPD, he saw opportunity elsewhere and applied for other jobs. Pennington said he always thought Serpas would lead the NOPD one day.
"I guess he got impatient," Pennington recalled.
In 2001, Serpas left to head the 2,000-member Washington State Patrol. There, he quickly instituted weekly accountability meetings. Troopers began arresting more people, ticketing more motorists, clamping down on drunken drivers. Politicians heralded the strengthened enforcement and the drop in fatalities.
In Nashville, Serpas had a high visibility to match his tough-on-crime rhetoric. He lobbied for legislation, working the Statehouse with aplomb. When challenged, he did not hold back.
"Some call it temper, some call it passion," said Nashville Councilman Michael Craddock. "He is very outspoken. There's been once or twice where he even used the word 'damn' on television. He has no problem showing his passion."
Reduce violent crime, reform the NOPD
Last week, on his last day in Nashville, Serpas sent an e-mail message to his entire staff.
"I am often called the 'stat' guy -- but here is the stat that always meant the most to me: Every day I walked the streets of Nashville, without fail, I was approached by a citizen, a business owner, a grandparent, who said to me, 'Chief, please thank the men and women of your department, I feel safer and that makes my life a little better,'" the message read in part.
Serpas' note also said officers should remember that the partnerships formed with the community are the key to success. He quoted former president Theodore Roosevelt, and signed the letter: "With great respect and humility."
Less than 24 hours later, Serpas stood in Gallier Hall, wearing a crescent-star badge.
There, he pounded home his three-pronged approach to restoring confidence in the NOPD and lowering crime. Accountability. Transparency. Collaboration.
By way of reintroducing himself to New Orleanians, he announced open Comstat meetings, called for an audit of the department's crime-reporting mechanisms, and cited the importance of working with the community. These are strategies he's used before. These strategies, according to the dots on the map, work.
His main goal is to reduce violent crime. He next mission is to reform the NOPD. The first step will center on the Public Integrity Bureau, the agency's internal affairs unit.
And his ultimate goal, he acknowledged in an interview days later, will very likely be measured by the feedback from the community.
"I would like to think that four or five years from now people will look at the Police Department and say: 'I trust them, I believe they care about me and my family or my business or guests, and that we can count on them to do a professional courteous job," Serpas said.
"That is golden. If we can get that, everything else falls in place."
After nine years away, the ambitious local police officer has made good on his promise. He is now head of the NOPD.
Serpas' mentor didn't make it to the most recent swearing-in ceremony. But Pennington still keeps tabs on his former protege.
"People expect him to come in and perform miracles," Pennington said. "And he knows that. He's ready for it." |
