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Knapp Commission Case Study

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The Knapp Commission was a committee of five citizens established and impanelled in 1972 by the New York City Mayor who was John Lindsay during that time. The commission endeavored to investigate corrupt activities of police officers, detectives, and supervisors working in the New York Police Department (NYPD). Mayor Lindsay was pressured to investigate corruption in the NYPD after a series of articles that appeared in local newspapers that detailed a wide breadth of corrupt activities of officers throughout the NYPD. The two officers that helped launch the investigation were Frank Serpico and David Durk. They were once both idealistic officers who became increasingly frustrated after attempting to report the corrupt activities to their …show more content…
The officers disclosed that in the initial indoctrination into the NYPD, other officers received free food, coffee, and often were offered bribes in lieu of issuing summonses. Furthermore, the corruption was even more systematic and sophisticated in the undercover plain-clothes unit. Officers and detectives were on controlled payments to the police (“pads”). Nevertheless, Serpico and Durk befriended a reporter from the New York Times who printed the first article on April 25, 1970. This front page exclusive about the corrupt activities of the NYPD ushered in one of the biggest scandals in NYPD history; and Mayor Lindsay created the Knapp Commission in 1971, which was named after a judge he chose, Whitman Knapp (What-When-How, n.d.). The officers testimonies lead to the changes in the NYPD policies and procedures (Dempsey & Forst, …show more content…
Meat eaters would openly solicit free meals and would proactively solicit bribes and would attempt to obtain assignments in enforcement units that were mandated to enforce gambling, prostitution, and narcotics laws. One of the principal recommendations of the Knapp Commission was to appoint a special prosecutor, outside of New York City, to investigate police corruption, reorganization of the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Division, and command-level responsibility for corrupt officers. Serpico and Durk testified before the Knapp Commission and recommendations of the Knapp Commission led to many anticorruption policies in the NYPD. Durk career suffered as a result of his testimony (What-When-How, n.d.). Consequently, testimony from dozens of other witnesses, including the former Police Commissioner corrupt patrolmen, and the victims of police shakedowns, were heard. As an immediate result of the testimony of the witnesses, criminal indictments against corrupt police officials were handed down. Commissioner Patrick Murphy was appointed by Mayor Lindsay shortly after the commission was formed to clean up the department, implement proactive integrity checks, transfer senior personnel on a huge scale, rotate critical jobs, ensure sufficient funds to pay informants, and crack down on citizen

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