(End of article proposals - Fodder for discussion)
1. Strengthen the selection process and psychological screening process for police recruits. Police departments are simply a microcosm of the greater society. If your screening standards encourage corrupt and forceful tendencies, you will end up with a larger concentration of these types of individuals;
2. Provide ongoing, examples-based training and simulations. Not only telling but showing police officers how they are expected to behave and react is critical;
3. Require community involvement from police officers so they know the districts and the individuals they are policing. This will encourage empathy and understanding;
4. Enforce the laws against everyone, including police officers. When police officers do wrong, use those individuals as examples of what not to do – so that others know that this behavior will not be tolerated. And tell the police unions and detective endowment associations they need to keep their noses out of the justice system;
5. Support the good guys. Honest cops who tell the truth and behave in exemplary fashion should be honored, promoted and held up as strong positive examples of what it means to be a cop;
6. Last but not least, police cannot police themselves. Develop permanent, independent boards to review incidents of police corruption and brutality—and then fund them well and support them publicly. Only this can change a culture that has existed since the beginnings of the modern police department.
Stories from the 70’s.....
Liberalism is far more dangerous than the police...just watch what Obama does after the election.
Good read. Long, but a good read. Thanks for posting this.
He’s obviously just a cop hater who wants to do drugs without getting arrested.
/
Ping!
I'd love to meet Frank
Of all of his six proposals, I support the last one, the independent commissions proposal, the most.
FWIW...I love dogs...I, and my family, have probably had 20 over my lifetime. But because of the movie, my then wife insisted we get an Old English Sheepdog..absolutely the DUMBEST animal on the planet, and IMPOSSIBLE to keep neat and clean..
Hard to argue with The Man himself, isn’t it?
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.
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.
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.