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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.

“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.