Posted on 10/29/2014 9:33:00 AM PDT by re_tail20
In the opening scene of the 1973 movie “Serpico,” I am shot in the face—or to be more accurate, the character of Frank Serpico, played by Al Pacino, is shot in the face. Even today it’s very difficult for me to watch those scenes, which depict in a very realistic and terrifying way what actually happened to me on Feb. 3, 1971. I had recently been transferred to the Narcotics division of the New York City Police Department, and we were moving in on a drug dealer on the fourth floor of a walk-up tenement in a Hispanic section of Brooklyn. The police officer backing me up instructed me (since I spoke Spanish) to just get the apartment door open “and leave the rest to us.”
One officer was standing to my left on the landing no more than eight feet away, with his gun drawn; the other officer was to my right rear on the stairwell, also with his gun drawn. When the door opened, I pushed my way in and snapped the chain. The suspect slammed the door closed on me, wedging in my head and right shoulder and arm. I couldn’t move, but I aimed my snub-nose Smith & Wesson revolver at the perp (the movie version unfortunately goes a little Hollywood here, and has Pacino struggling and failing to raise a much-larger 9-millimeter automatic). From behind me no help came. At that moment my anger got the better of me. I made the almost fatal mistake of taking my eye off the perp and screaming to the officer on my left: “What the hell you waiting for? Give me a hand!” I turned back to face a gun blast in my face. I had cocked my weapon and fired back at him...
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
Hard to argue with The Man himself, isn’t it?
“And in blue cities and states the review boards will be loaded with cop-hating liberals; the cop will always be in the wrong. How do we prevent that? “
Make it like a jury. The board is temporary. They are randomly selected, they will sit for terms lasting a couple of weeks, they will be paid for their time and they need to be committed to the process.
I notice that there was no mention of a warrant being involved in his forced entry of the apartment.
Maybe there was one, but not in the story.
"...I'd...require on-duty law enforcement to wear some sort of video recording equipment to record in a loop the last 30 minutes..."
I say "not enough". There should be no way for the officer to disable the camera. If the camera is not recording, the officer does not work that day.
Also, there needs to be a real-time data uplink.
Also, at least an entire shift of recording time. If the cop makes comments beforehand I want to know about it, like the cop in Arizona who stated hours before shooting a homeless guy that he planned on "shooting him in the penis". (he then murdered the guy).
Oddly enough, I do not credit Serpico with much, other than being a jerk. To explain:
1) The vast majority of policemen and soldiers behave in a reflection of their treatment. If their morale is bad because they are mistreated, they act bad. Corruption in the NYPD didn’t just happen, any more than the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, contemporary to it, just happened.
2) To put NYC in context, the mayor before Lindsay, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., was the last of the Tammany Hall big city machine politicians. Tammany broke with the radical wing of the Democrats, led by Eleanor Roosevelt. Then for his third term, he broke with Tammany, and the existing big city machine semi-collapsed.
Lindsay came in as a Liberal Republican, then dropped being a Republican, then became a Liberal Democrat. This pretty much left the city in shambles.
So nobody was really in charge, liberalism was running rampant breaking anything that wasn’t already broken, and the morale of the police was in the negative numbers.
3) Enter Serpico, who like many before him was exceptionally naive, and insists that the system work when it clearly doesn’t. And they are always willing to try and force others to do what they want.
They often never “get it”, and end up hurting others.
4) What really put the nails in his coffin was Rudy Giuliani. He understood the police and they understood him, he supported them and they supported him. And their morale soared, far higher than it had been in many decades. And Giuliani had a plan that made sense to them.
And many of the police were just amazed at how police corruption evaporated. They were happy to do their jobs for once, and respected for it. Suddenly everything worked.
But in the final analysis, I’m not surprised that Serpico is still disliked and unhappy.
I have a lot of family in law enforcement.
This guy is right. He is HATED by many cops. Because he broke the one rule, never rat on another cop.
This country, as a whole would be better off if rewards were merit-based. I believe, regardless of Frank’s comments on current events, his bulletpoints are all valid.
I agree with you regarding pay... but realize rookie cops should be allowed to wash out when their mentors recognize a problem. So many issues I see in my industry are the result of replacing tried and true mentoring methods with “common core” type “training”.
Last... Frank Serpico is a good cop amongst many bad cops.
Well I always thought of him as what every cop should be and he inspired my life. It’s not naivite, it’s Right! Some are willing to fight for that, live that way. The guys behind him just wanted a fatter wallet. Both got what they sought and will yet further before Christ.
“3) Enter Serpico, who like many before him was exceptionally naive, and insists that the system work when it clearly doesn’t. And they are always willing to try and force others to do what they want.”
So your answer is go along to get along? Become corrupt like everyone else? My understanding is that he didnt try to force them to do what he wanted. Other cops were insisting that he accept graft and eventually tried to get him killed when he refused. At that point he turned rat. IMO he should have just quit the force.
The NYPD isn’t the only police force in the country.
Again, if you use the military analogy, here we have soldiers stuck in a demoralized unit with bad leaders, that results in a war crime. What should a private assigned to that unit do?
The last answer was the best: he should have quit the force and gone to a better one. Even bad organizations usually realize that forcing someone good to stay won’t work, because they won’t play ball. So they let them go.
Leadership problems are solved at the leadership level, not below. The NYPD stayed bad until Giuliani came along, not before.
very north Korean.
That’s excusing the abandonment of the rule of law.
Giuliani didn’t straighten out the NYPD.
If the problems caused by King George III in the colonies were to be solved at the “leadership level”, there would have been no War of Independence.
> That’s excusing the abandonment of the rule of law.
A subtle difference, at the time Serpico joined the NYPD, the rule of law had already been abandoned. What he tried to do was a bottom up restoration of the rule of law.
While there really was no excuse for the leadership to abandon the rule of law like they did, neither the police command nor the elected leaders *wanted* to change, or to do the hard work necessary to bring about change.
This meant that Serpico wanted to force his peers to change, force the police chain of command to change, and force the political leaders to change.
And that is not the way things are done, either in a functional system or a dysfunctional one.
His alternative was to seek employment elsewhere. In a different place, he might have ascended to become a chief. But as it is, he is just a bitter old man.
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