Jammed Up: Bad Cops, Police Misconduct, and the New York City Police Department

Prologue

xv PROLOGUE “This is car 2119.” “Call Greenpoint Hospital.” “We’re bringing in a wounded cop.” “All right?— .” “25th Precinct.” “Jesus Christ.” “Guess who got shot.” “Serpico.” “You think a cop did it?” “I know six cops said they’d like to.” “Hello?” “New York Times.” “Oh, my God!” Many readers will identify the above as the opening dialogue from the 1973 movie Serpico, which dramatized perhaps the most infamous case of organized police corruption in the modern history of the New York City Police Department. As the Knapp Commission noted during its investigation of the so-called Serpico scandal, at the time Frank Serpico reported the corruption to investigative reporters at the New York Times, over half of all plainclothes officers in the NYPD were engaged in profit-motivated corruption. Although the movie Serpico suggests that the misconduct enterprise was protected by a group of officers who would enforce the rules of the game through violence or the threat of violence (including the alleged shooting of Frank Serpico in retaliation for making the systemic corruption public), the most probable tools of enforcement were what the majority of line officers feared most from their colleagues: social isolation and the “silent treatment.”1 Whether Serpico was set up by fellow police officers to be shot during a drug bust on the night of February 3, 1971 remains debatable. What is unquestionable, however, was the response by the NYPD and New York City at large once the New York Times published Serpico’s accounts of the corruption activities. Once the scandal was made public, Mayor John Lindsay convened the Knapp Commission in 1970 to investigate allegations of systemic police corruption in the NYPD. In its report the Commission famously identified xvi Prologue two types of corrupt police officers: Meat Eaters and Grass Eaters. The former represented officers actively engaged in police corruption and who sought out and exploited opportunities to maintain and even expand the corruption enterprise. The latter represented officers who did not necessarily participate in the actual corrupt activities but who accepted money for not reporting the corruption to police command staff. The Knapp Commission argued that during the Serpico era, the NYPD was largely organized around a value system that protected police corruption, and that the department maintained few if any effective strategies for preventing and detecting corrupt activities. In response, Mayor Lindsay appointed Patrick V. Murphy as a reformist police commissioner who made sweeping changes to the bureaucratic structure of the NYPD. Among these were the creation of the field associate program, where a small number of academy graduates from different classes were asked to surreptitiously serve as “undercover anti-corruption investigator(s)” while working their regular (usually precinct-level patrol) assignments.2 In addition, Murphy created an early warning system designed to identify violence-prone police officers, and he developed field internal affairs units.3 Finally, and perhaps most important, Murphy prohibited organized crime officers from enforcing laws against “victimless crimes,” such as prostitution and illegal gambling , unless complaints about these activities originated from outside the department.4 Research for this book largely begins where Serpico left off. It examines patterns of misconduct in the NYPD from 1975 through 1996 and is anchored loosely by the Knapp Commission inquiry and the Mollen Commission investigation that took place 20 years later. Perhaps unlike the Serpico era, the NYPD from 1975 to 1996 was not dominated by a value system that favored police corruption. Though there were a small number of scandals since Serpico, they were relatively isolated, involving a limited number of precincts and/or officers. Even the corruption scandal that led to the formation of the Mollen Commission—though it was widely publicized —did not reach nearly the scope of the Knapp Commission–era scandal.5 Although our data include a number of officers who were part of the Serpico-era misconduct spectacle (in many cases it took several years to successfully identify and adjudicate the offending officers), most of the officers who were forced to leave the job because of official misconduct (i.e., profit-motivated corruption) co-offended in small groups, and in many cases with people they knew before joining the NYPD. Given that our study period begins in the wake of the Knapp Com- xvii Prologue mission (1972) report and concludes shortly after the publication of the Mollen Commission (1993) report, in Sherman’s (1978) terms this book examines patterns of...