The Cop Who Told the Truth
By: Sarah Cords
Tags: Police, New York City, Corruption, History, American History

The Cop Who Told the Truth

How Frank Serpico continues to pay the price for revealing police corruption

New York City in 1974. Photo by Hope Alexander, at https://catalog.archives.gov/id/555733

On a dark February night in 1971, a plainclothes police officer approached an apartment door in Brooklyn, New York, behind which a suspected drug deal was taking place. He was accompanied by two other police officers, who stood some distance away from the door, apparently to provide back-up. The officer knocked on the door to attempt a drug buy, and when it opened a crack, he started to wedge himself inside. Immediately, the door was slammed on his arm, and he struggled to raise his gun and call back to one of the other officers for support.

When he turned his attention back to the person attempting to shut the door on him, he was shot in the face.

That officer was named Frank Serpico, and although nobody expected him to survive the shooting, he would go on to become one of the most famous whistleblowers and exposers of police corruption ever.

A system that made honest cops afraid to be honest

Long before 2020 and protests and calls to defund the police, there was Frank Serpico and his charges of widespread corruption within the New York Police Department (NYPD).

Francesco Vincent Serpico was born in Brooklyn in 1936, the child of Italian immigrants. After a two-year stint in the U.S. Army in the early 1950s, he worked as a youth counselor, and eventually graduated with a Bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York. On September 11, 1959, he joined the New York City police department as a patrolman.

Almost immediately, it became clear that he would not easily fit into the culture of the NYPD.

After working as a patrolman, Serpico was assigned to a Narcotics division of the force. Even while he was training, when making arrests or interacting with suspects, he would often be offered bribes. He turned them down, but all around him cops were expecting and accepting the payoffs. The practice was so endemic it had its own name; it was known as “the pad.” This began to weigh on his conscience, and eventually, he started reporting these activities to his superiors and others who he thought might be interested in addressing what he saw as widespread corruption.

One incident in particular became a turning point for him. During the unsettled and hot summer of 1966, many cops, Serpico included, were assigned temporary riot duty in order to patrol areas of the city where it was believed racial riots and protesting might break out. At the end of one of those shifts, another officer delivered an envelope to Serpico and noted that it was from a person known to be involved in gambling in the area.

The envelope contained $300. He didn’t know what to do with it, and he didn’t know who to tell that he didn’t want it.

Serpico didn’t know where to turn, but eventually, he sought the advice of another officer, a friend who had been in the Criminal Investigation Course (“plainclothes school”) with him. This officer, David Durk, was also aware of, and — most importantly — bothered by the corruption he too saw in the force. Durk also brought something more valuable than commiseration to the table: he had many political contacts, including some in John Lindsay’s administration (New York’s mayor at the time). Although their initial attempt to bring attention to the envelope of cash given to Serpico went nowhere, in the following years (as Serpico continued to work as a plainclothes officer) they would again collaborate (although mostly unsuccessfully) on how best to draw attention to the less savory aspects of the department’s policing methods.

Finally, in 1968, Serpico was involved when bodega owners Juan and Delores Carreras were investigated and arrested for running a “policy game” — basically an illegal lottery, or “numbers game” — and also for paying off police officers to look away from their activities. Numerous officers who had accepted bribes were named, and eventually, the NYPD had to open a grand jury investigation into the affair. Frank Serpico would testify to that grand jury, and although he had hoped to answer questions about how many of their superiors encouraged the graft, he was only asked questions about his fellow officers. By the time that investigation and trial concluded, only street-level officers (as Serpico himself would call them: “flunky cops”) would be charged with wrongdoing.

Serpico was done with trying to reform the system from within.

Going to the press

On April 25, 1970, an article by journalist David Burnham ran in the New York Times. Before it ran, the city and the NYPD heard that the Times was getting ready to publish a “blockbuster” story about police corruption, and Mayor Lindsay rushed to make it look like the city was still capable of investigating itself: he called for the creation of a five-person committee to “review all city procedures” currently in use to keep an eye on the Police Department. The committee would become known as the Knapp Commission (named for its chairperson, Whitman Knapp).

Before the commission could meet for hearings, Serpico knocked on that ill-fated apartment door in February of 1971. After he was shot, and during his recovery, he demanded to see the police department’s report about the incident. What he learned was that no other officers called in a “10–13” — a call from police indicating that a police officer needed assistance. Instead, a resident of the building had called the police when he heard the shooting, and eventually, another squad car had arrived on the scene. Two cops picked up Serpico and delivered him to the hospital.

Years later, Serpico learned that one of the cops who had picked him up told another friend, “If I knew it was Serpico, I would have left him there to bleed to death.”

Testifying about systemic, systematic corruption

Frank Serpico testified before the Knapp Commission in 1971. This is part of what he had to say:

“I hope that this investigation and any future ones will deal with corruption at all levels within the department and not limit themselves to cases involving individual patrolmen. Police corruption cannot exist unless it is at least tolerated at higher levels in the department. Therefore, the most important result that can come from these hearings is a conviction by police officers, even more than the public, that the department will change.”

By the time he answered the Knapp Commission’s questions in 1971, Serpico had already been waging his lonely battle against his colleagues’ participation in graft and other abuses of power for five years. He had tried to raise the alarm among his superiors and in the mayor’s office. At every turn he was thwarted, and yet he kept going to work, trying to fulfill his oath as a police officer sworn to protect the public. He had something to say on the basic responsibilities of police officers as well:

“It is just as important for policemen to change their attitudes toward the public. A policeman’s first obligation is to be responsible to the needs of the community he serves. The department must realize that an effective continuing relationship between the police and the public is mote important than an impressive arrest record.”

Frank Serpico in 2013 .User:Joeyjojo86, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Still trying to shine a light on police corruption

Frank Serpico has never really gone away, although he retired from the NYPD in 1972 (he receives a disability pension) and relocated to Europe for a period in the 1970s.

He says that he still gets hate mail from active and retired NYPD police officers. Hopefully, none of it has been as breathtakingly mean as one of the cards he received while recovering in the hospital in 1971. It was a typical condolence card, and the printed message read: “With Sincere Sympathy.” After those words, the sender had scrawled this message: “That you didn’t get your brains blown out, you rat bastard. Happy relapse.”

But still, he tries to draw attention to police corruption and violence in all its forms. When interviewed in June of 2020, Serpico compared the continuing problem of police corruption to the coronavirus: “We have this virus among us, and we don’t know who has it. Police corruption too is a virus.”