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More than just a few bad apples
Serpico, partially deafened in one ear by the shooting, testified in the inquiry himself, saying: “I hope that police officers in the future will not experience the same frustration and anxiety that I was subjected to for the past five years at the hands of my superiors because of my attempt to report corruption. I was made to feel that I had burdened them with an unwanted task.” He urged police hierarchy to create “an atmosphere in which the dishonest officer fears the honest one and not the other way around”.
Durk told the commission: “Corruption is not about money at all, because there is no amount of money that you can pay a cop to risk his life 365 days a year. Being a cop is a vocation or it is nothing at all, and that’s what I saw destroyed by the corruption of the New York City Police Department, destroyed for me and for thousands of others like me.”
The BBC’s 1972 report on the state of New York policing found a demoralised force. Captain Edward Rogers, commander of the Ninth Precinct, told 24 Hours: “Morale is at a very low ebb at this time in the department due to the Knapp Commission, when 95% of honest men are now being labelled corrupt, when the Knapp Commission at the most revealed maybe 5% of the department is corrupt. The other 95% are bearing the brunt of this corrupt label.” He added: “Something of this type has certainly put us back for many years in our relations with the public, and unjustifiably so.”
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Durk told the BBC that the commission’s big achievement was to have “dispensed with the rotten apple theory” that had previously been the response to any police corruption allegations. “The administration would always say, ‘What? Shocking, terrible, show us the villain and we will hang him.’ And they usually make a very dramatic show of hanging one or two… usually quite low-level people. I think what the Knapp Commission did was to show the extent and the seriousness of what corruption really means.”
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