Blue on Blue: An Insider’s Story of Good Cops Catching Bad Cops

Charles Campisi “Blue on Blue: An Insider’s Story of Good Cops Catching Bad Cops,” Scribner, 2017, 342 pp.

I was very much impressed with the management techniques practiced by Chief Charles Campisi, head of NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB) from 1996 through 2014, as he investigated complaints against the 36,000 member police force and pro-actively, randomly checked the integrity of that police force.  Just like watching a real-life Tom Selleck in Blue Bloods: unquestionable integrity is the one word describing Chief Campisi. During his IAB tenure, the number of New Yorkers shot, wounded, or killed by cops every year declined by ninety percent, and the number of cops failing integrity tests shrank to an equally impressive low figure.  

While he unfailingly praises the mostly-good police in New York, he is not particularly complementary to the press or the union representatives, deservedly so.

The elements that turned the IAB around were:

*assigning an incorruptible leader who would not brook political interference.

*the ‘draft’ the-best protocol set up for assigning officers to the IAB and thereby extinguishing the ‘rat’ mantra that went with the job.

*the pro-active ‘integrity’ random tests of officers in various precincts.

My Notes:

Pg. 45f:  Today a lot of people have forgotten what it was like in Manhattan and the rest of New York City in the mid-1970s, just how bad crime was back then.  In 1975 there were just under 1,700 murders in the city, more than 600 of them in Manhattan alone, and more than 90,000 robberies.  (By 2014 the number of murders citywide had dropped to 335, and robberies to about 16,000.)  And, the job had its dangers.  In 1974 and ’75 fourteen NYPD cops were killed in the line of duty, all but two of them killed by gunfire; hundreds of others were injured by guns, knives, clubs, fists, car accidents, vicious dogs—you name it.  (In 2013, by comparison, except for 9/11 related illness deaths, no NYPD officer died in the line of duty.  Sadly, in 2014 four NYPD officers died in the line of duty, two of them shot and killed while they sat in their patrol car on a Brooklyn street.)

Pg. 71:  Prior to the 1992 arrest of Officer Michael Dowd and other corrupt cops in Brooklyn’s 75^th Precinct, which led to the reorginaziton of the Internal Affairs Bureau, there had been a twenty year cycle of corruption explosions.  Serpico in the 60s is well-known and this led to the Knapp Commission; yet, in 1986 eleven cops from the 77^th Precinct in Bed-Stuy—the co-called Buddy Boys—were arrested on charges that they knocked down drug dealer’s doors, stealing money and drugs, which they later resold to other dealers.  (It was perceived by the IAB prior to 1992 that their superiors in the NYPD were afraid of the bad publicity that would be generated if they were too aggressive in pursuing corruption).

Pg. 78:  As the IAB was perceived as a dumping ground for cops in trouble.  How do you turn it around to become an effective enforcer?  Who would join?  The answer was simple: You don’t give them a choice—you draft the best of the best, which began in 1993 and this ‘drafting’ process eliminated the stigma of being a ‘rat’ as they had no choice in the matter.  The IAB was given the ability to draft the most respected detectives who would each serve for a two-year hitch.  IAB from then on got first pick of all the sergeants and lieutenants who wanted to move into investigative supervisory positions as well as undisputed choices of anyone with special skills that were needed (language, computer, etc.).  Incidentally, this draft system has since been copied by police departments across the country and the world.

Pg. 119:  Example of integrity tests results using 2012.  That year the IAB conducted five hundred thirty random and targeted integrity tests.  Of those they had thirty-four ‘administrative’ failures, meaning the cops failed to follow proper procedures, and two supervisory failures, meaning a sergeant or a lieutenant or other supervisor failed to follow proper procedures.  But out of those five hundred thirty integrity tests only six cops stole the money or the drugs or committed another criminal act (that’s about one percent).

Pg. 136:  In 2013, in a city of 8.4 million people, in a Department of 36,000 armed cops making 400,000 arrests, including 5,000 gun arrests, NYPD officers shot and killed 8 people.  In comparison, in 1973 there were 118 people shot and wounded and 58 killed, seven times more people killed by cops than there were four decades later. 

Pg. 325:  9/11:  343 FDNY firefighters and EMTs, 23 NYPD cops, and 37 Port Authority Police were killed in the Twin Towers.  The official death toll in the World Trade Center attack stands at 2,801.

In searching the rubble few survivors were found, only twenty, with the last one found alive twenty-seven hours after the attack.  There were relatively few people seriously injured, either.  In almost every case, if you made it out before the towers collapsed you lived, if you didn’t you died. 

Pg. 328:  In 2014 Bill de Blasio, the former city public advocate—that’s sort of an elected city ‘watchdog’ position—became the new mayor of New York City.  Many of the positions he took during his campaign are perceived by the NYPD rank and file as antipolice, especially his suggestion that the Department’s stop-and-frisk tactic is inherently racist.  (Not long after the election, the author was forced into retirement, my words, not his; he would have had to retire in eighteen months anyway when reaching age 63).