Expert Outsider The lessons of the Crime Commission. by PHIL CAMPBELL he Memphis-Shelby Crime Commission is an odd study in political legitimacy. Out of seemingly nowhere, an experienced law-enforcement official with silvery hair and glittering eyes rides in from New York and starts making recommendations that everyone jumps to enact. Two years pass, and this official is now an entrenched part of the criminal-justice scene, a consensus builder who can inspire reform because he's got the right weapons for the job -- hard data and statistics that no one ever seems to question. That official, Robert Bryden, is still riding the momentum he gained when he first arrived to head the Crime Commission and found himself smack in the middle of the most emotional issue in recent law-enforcement history. Memphis needed more cops, that everybody knew. The question was how many. "A lot of people in the system told me that to recommend hiring more than 75 more police officers was a waste of time," Bryden recalls. "There were people who discouraged us." In the end, Bryden went beyond that, using statistics to make a bold declaration for his first "best practice" report: "For each additional officer added to a police force in a big city, 24 [major kinds of] crime are prevented annually." The statistical anecdote that got around in the media was about Boston, a city comparable in size to Memphis. "They have 800 more officers more than [Memphis]. They had also reduced crime more than any other city in the United States than New York at that point in the 1990s." After that first "best practice," the media -- print and broadcast --were behind Bryden, and Mayor Willie Herenton recommended to the Memphis City Council the hiring of 200 more police officers over the next two years. The issue changed from getting the money to finance the personnel expansion to hiring the right people for the job, and Bryden's input was sought on that topic as well. Bryden, an energetic 54-year-old ex-Drug Enforcement Administration official from South Texas, is too media savvy to say anything too negative about what he thinks of Memphis. The biggest "challenge to an outsider," he says, is the two-headed form of government that can slow down the swift progress Bryden likes to see. "I like the Southern charm [of Memphis]," says Bryden, who has lived in a variety of cities, including New Orleans. "I like the pulse of a city that lives on the Mississippi River. You can look back [in the past] at that river and you can see better times, maybe. And that gives you the opportunity to think that better times are going to come again." After two years -- and the implementation of nine of Bryden's "best practices" -- elected law-enforcement officials can only sing the commission's praises. Almost everyone, especially the Memphis Police Department and the District Attorney General's office, has been asking Bryden for small studies, if not full-blown inquiries, into specific questions about how they can do their job better. "The commission encourages us to think out-of-the-box in terms of how we approach this massive problem," says District Attorney General Bill Gibbons. "We don't have to keep doing things the same way we've always done." Gibbons gives the commission credit for two ideas he's adopting, a centralized drug court and a community court in Frayser. Both ideas were inspired by Bryden's "best practice" reports. After some hesitation three years ago, Herenton played an instrumental role in the establishment of the commission and is now fully behind Herenton. He says, through his spokesperson Carey Hoffman, "Bob Bryden has demonstrated excellent leadership. I'm impressed with his knowledge and ability to work with the city and the Memphis Police Department and other law-enforcement agencies." Earlier this month, Bryden published a two-year summary on his own organization. In the neat, brochure-sized report are the nine best practices and how much progress has been made on each. The only practice Bryden isn't sure about is No. 6, in which the commission encouraged coordinated and community-based after-school programs. The thinking behind the recommendation is based on the fact that juveniles are likely to commit more crimes in the late afternoon. Bryden, however, was never able to gather reliable statistics on how many after-school programs existed in the first place, making it impossible to gauge if more after-school programs were ever created. Bryden's overall success could be attributed to a number of things, but there are three major reasons why his legitimacy has grown over the past 24 months. First, Bryden, who makes $150,000 a year, has corporate sponsorship. He is fully funded by Guardsmark and other large companies in town. Though commission founders are not happy that they ultimately enrolled only 400 "citizen-members" -- 99,600 fewer than originally expected -- they are aware that a lack of grass-roots support is easily countered by a steady flow of corporate dollars. Second, Bryden's board is composed of many of the top elected officials, from Herenton to Gibbons to U.S. Attorney General Veronica Coleman. The people who would be enacting the "best practice" recommendations are tentatively approving them beforehand, meaning that the commission is less of an independent body than it is a research arm for elected officials Third, the issue Bryden is targeting is crime -- something at the front of everyone's mind. Vague concepts such as poor zoning, quality of life, and environmental safety just don't compare to the personal, visceral reactions people have to the homicide rate. It's difficult to imagine an issue like the city's dire, ongoing housing problem gaining so much attention or private-sector support, or a new literacy program headed up by a tough, smart outsider inspiring so much media ink and airtime, to say nothing of getting a decent office with a good view in the Morgan Keegan Tower. Regardless, Bryden seems to be nicely fulfilling his role as the city's crime expert. His commission has several eagerly anticipated studies due out in the next several months on subjects ranging from gangs to drugs. Bryden sums up his organization's accomplishments succinctly: "For a small office with just two people, really, we've focused policy and focused the debate on the way things are done." And that's exactly what he was recruited to do.