City & State New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
July 25, 2016
and the rest “wished they were honest.” It was the willingness of that 80 percent to remain silent about the misdeeds of the small percentage of their corrupt colleagues that defined the culture of what was shorthanded as “the blue wall of silence.” “Narcotics dealers, gamblers and businessmen make illicit payments of millions of dollars a year to the policemen of New York, according to policemen, law‐enforcement experts and New Yorkers who make such payments themselves,” the Times wrote in a story that rocked the city in April of 1970. Perhaps even more disquieting was Times reporter David Burnham’s conclusion that the highest levels of the NYPD and the Lindsay administration had turned a blind eye to the corruption, even after it was repeatedly brought to their attention. Almost a year after that bombshell series hit, Serpico was shot in the face while trying to make a drug bust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. According to his firsthand account in posted in Politico in 2014, Serpico had been abandoned by his fellow officers after he was shot by a drug suspect. “I heard a voice saying, ‘Don’t worry, you be all right, you be all right,’ and when I opened my eyes I saw an old Hispanic man looking down at me like Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan,” Serpico recounted. “My ‘backup’ was nowhere in sight. They hadn’t even called for assistance – I never heard the famed ‘Code 1013,’ meaning ‘Officer Down.’ They didn’t call an ambulance, either, I later learned; the old man did.” Serpico says the officers were never called to account for their actions, but were given awards for saving his life. Years later, Serpico says he confronted the former Commissioner Patrick Murphy, whose tenure included that tumultuous period, but Murphy walked away. Murphy died in 2011. Among the recommendations of the Knapp Commission was the establishment of special prosecutor to pursue police corruption cases. Such an office was opened in 1973, but it was abolished in 1990 by then-Gov. Mario Cuomo and the state Legislature. On Mayor David Dinkins’ watch, it was not a Serpico-type whistleblower from inside the NYPD who prompted the appointment of yet another panel to investigate police corruption. It was the arrest in the spring of 1992 of NYPD
officer Michael Dowd and five fellow NYPD officers, who were caught up in an undercover drug operation run by the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Narcotics Bureau. Dowd and his crew of fellow officers, operating out of the 75th precinct in East New York, Brooklyn, earned as much as an additional $8,000 a week targeting drug dealers for their money and drugs, while at the same time providing protection for other drug dealers. In response to the screaming tabloid coverage of Dowd and his crew, Dinkins selected Milton Mollen, a retired state Supreme Court judge, to head up what would be the sixth independent panel to investigate internal corruption with the NYPD. At the Mollen hearings, the public learned that Dowd had been on the NYPD’s radar for at least six years prior to his arrest by Suffolk County police. Yet, despite being the subject of 16 complaints over that period for robbing drug dealers and selling cocaine, NYPD brass looked the other way. Internally Dowd was described in his personnel file as having “good career potential.” The Mollen Commission concluded that “while the vast majority of police officers” did not engage in corrupt behavior, there were pockets of corruption in 10 of the city’s most crime-ridden precincts. In these areas, anywhere from a handful to as many as 20 officers were a law unto themselves. The commission reported that for at least a decade, “from the top brass down to local precinct commanders and supervisors there was a pervasive belief that uncovering serious corruption would harm careers and the reputation of the department.” “We find as shocking the incompetence and the inadequacies of the department to police itself,” said Mollen, the panel’s chairman. But the Mollen Report’s findings were rejected by then-Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who at the time was serving his first stint as commissioner under Dinkins. “It besmirches the reputation of the department with a rather broad brush that I don’t think is appropriate or warranted,” Kelly said. One of the key recommendations of the Mollen Commission was the creation of an independent agency with subpoena power to oversee how the NYPD policed itself internally. The proposal gained traction in the New York City Council, which moved to create
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such an agency with subpoena power that could legally compel the NYPD to produce documents. But incoming Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, himself a former federal prosecutor who enjoyed strong police support at the time, succeeded in blocking the Council’s move in the courts. As an alternative, Giuliani used an executive order to create the Commission to Combat Police Corruption. The commission had a handful of staff lawyers with a six-figure budget, but no subpoena power. A decade later in 2005, Mark Pomerantz, the CCPC’s chairman, and himself a former federal prosecutor, resigned because he said the volunteer post required more time than he could commit. He cited the difficulty the watchdog agency was having in getting documents from the NYPD without subpoena power. Before he left the post, Pomerantz testified before a City Council committee that his panel had been stymied by the police department in its efforts to examine issues like fraudulent NYPD overtime claims, allegations of sexual misconduct, and how domestic violence cases involving members of the department were handled. Pomerantz said his agency also wanted to investigate allegations that supervisors within the NYPD regularly downgraded the seriousness of crimes that were reported to improve the department’s performance statistics. At the time, the NYPD denied Pomerantz’s claims and asserted that the commission had gotten all the files in every case in which the NYPD deemed there was an instance of serious misconduct. Three years later, the commission was once again in the headlines after Willa Bernstein, one of its four staff attorneys, went public with claims she was terminated for having an anti-police bias. At the time, the Daily News reported that