Frank Serpico is a former New York City police detective.

As a former police detective, I find myself appalled by the epidemic of police shootings across America—and the taint of profound distrust that has fallen on a profession I once loved. In my day a cop’s uniform and badge were our best defense. The gun was a last resort. We depended on the idea that citizens knew that killing a police officer held dire consequences. We were given a different kind of training that taught us to minimize the use firearms, particularly when restraining mentally disturbed people, and even if guns had to be drawn and used, to try to avoid shooting to kill if possible.

But when Terrence M. Cunningham, the chief of police in Wellesley, Mass., and president of America’s largest police management organization, issued a formal apology earlier this week to the nation’s minority population “for the actions of the past and the role that our profession has played in society’s historical mistreatment of communities of color,” he was making a long-overdue gesture. He was acknowledging, in effect, on behalf of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, that too many police in recent decades have been shooting first and asking questions later.


Sure, it’s never easy to know exactly when and under what circumstances you should fire. That was the tragedy of what occurred in Palm Springs two weeks ago, when two officers responding to a domestic disturbance call were shot dead when a 26-year-old ex-convict opened fire with an AR-15 rifle through a metal screen door. You try not to draw your weapon unless you have to, and those two brave officers, Lesley Zerebny and Jose "Gil" Vega, made the ultimate sacrifice because they acted with restraint.

I found myself in several situations like that as a cop in New York City back in the 1960s, some of which were portrayed (fairly accurately) in the 1973 movie “Serpico.” Once when I was off duty and returning from a movie with my girlfriend on my motorcycle, I witnessed a shooting in the street in front of a bar. Three men fired at a victim, killing him, then drove off. I quickly dropped my girlfriend off someplace safe, then followed in pursuit of the car, turning off my headlight. After the car came to a stop, double parking under a street lamp, one man got out holding a gun in each hand. I was armed with only an off-duty snub-nosed .38 special, which had just five rounds in the cylinder. I took cover across the nearest car's trunk, aiming at the suspect, and announced: "Police! Drop your guns! " The suspect turned and started running back to the car. I fired one warning shot, at which time the car took off, leaving the suspect. I overtook him and disarmed him (he had another gun in his coat pocket). But the reason I never fired at him is because, even though he’d just been involved in a homicide, I did not sense that he wanted to engage me. In another situation, however, I shot and wounded a fleeing felon, but only after he engaged me with gunfire (he also had an outstanding warrant for rape).

The point is, police are asked to make these judgment calls all the time; and for whatever reason, too many of them today are opting to pull out their weapons and begin firing no matter what. They evince an unconcern for human life that is horrifying. Plainly they are not being trained properly, and just as plainly the police brass in departments around the country are doing a poor job of weeding out bad seeds as recruits. Two years after Ferguson—and other cases where police have been caught on video using their firearms precipitously—the epidemic of shootings by police shows no signs of slowing down. Across the country, police appear to casually pump bullets into supposed perpetrators—usually black men—who are often just standing still on city streets.

Some cases are even worse. In Sacramento recently, two officers were seen on police video intentionally trying to run over a homeless man like road kill and then shooting him 14 times. That would be murder with forethought before any impartial jury, but the officers involved seemed to care less about taking an innocent human life for kicks. Once again, as we’ve seen in so many other cases, they appear to feel a kind of immunity behind their badge and uniform. That is what we also witnessed recently in Tulsa, Okla., when a police officer fired into the chest of 40-year-old Terence Crutcher, killing him even as he stood with his hands up. And in Charlotte, N.C., where Keith Scott, who was shot in the back, causing another round of angry and violent protests.

The nation is in the middle of a presidential election in which the main debate is about terrorist attacks, but statistics shows that Americans—especially minority Americans—are more likely to lose their lives to a police officer than to a terrorist.

There is only one way of reversing this trend. We need a whole new approach to police accountability that will systematically separate the good cops from the bad cops and weed out the latter. But that is not possible in an environment where what I call the “police brotherhood”—the brass, the unions and the district attorneys that are all in bed with each other—continue their code of silence about shooting crimes and other violence by police. In Chicago, there is a direct connection between the horrific spate of violence and shootings in that city and this police code of silence. In 2012, a jury awarded $850,000 in damages to Karolina Obrycka, a waitress who was beaten by a cop, after it found that a “pervasive code of silence” within the police department had allowed the police perpetrator, Anthony Abbate, to attack her without fear of punishment. A new series of articles by The Intercept found that after Chicago police officers Shannon Spalding and Danny Echeverria filed a whistleblower lawsuit, retaliation against them only intensified. The outcome of this code of silence—a lower standard for police behavior—is evident; according to the Chicago Tribune, at least 14 times since 2010 Chicago police officers shot someone and said they thought the person had a gun, but they never found one and often mistook other objects, like a wallet or flashlight, for a gun.

Poor training and recruitment – leading to jittery, overreactive or panicky cops who resort to violence too readily—also results from this lack of accountability and the code of silence. Every cop knows that if he or she complains about the performance of a partner or co-worker, not only will nothing happen to other person, but the complainers themselves will be targeted for bringing up the issue with their superiors. That came out in another lawsuit in New Jersey: After State Police Staff Sgt. Michael Daniele, a 14-year veteran of the canine unit, told a superior in 2006 that dog handlers were being taught by uncertified people, he was demoted. In 2010, a jury found that the State Police had violated New Jersey’s law protecting whistle-blowers and awarded Daniele more than $290,000 in damages and legal costs. And the laws on the books are not enough: A review by the Star-Ledger newspaper of 14 lawsuits filed by troopers against the New Jersey State Police also found that allegations of retaliation against whistleblowers persist.

Perhaps the best way to start to break through this code of silence within the police brotherhood is to set up a federal program that encourages and rewards whistleblowers inside police departments. I know this from first-hand experience. I was a whistleblower (though I prefer to use the term “lamp lighter,” since “whistleblower” has bad connotations) more than 40 years ago, and I was cast out and condemned by the police brotherhood (a banishment that continues to this day). But it is long past time to penetrate that brotherhood, and the initiative must come from Washington and the Justice Department.

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The old saying is still true: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Absent these changes—and any real accountability for the actions of police—it was inevitable that police ethics would erode. As a result, over the decades the community’s fear of and respect for police and has turned to rage and revenge, especially in minority neighborhoods where began a deadly cycle of police violence followed by retribution. Making things worse, police were given military-style armaments and harsher action was legitimized by the language of war – the “war on crime,” the “war on drugs” and so forth. The cop on the street was put on his guard, deepening the atmosphere of mutual fear, polarizing the already existing attitude of us against them. Even senior citizens, after traffic stops, were referred to behind their backs as "dirt bags" by police.

Psychologically, I would imagine this was to justify in their minds the "predatory" nature of their actions to meet quotas for handing out tickets. True, there was always a quota system—in my day, in the 1960s, it was 10 parking tickets and one moving violation per month. But with the corruption in bureaucracies and the squandering of our tax revenues it has fallen to the cops to beef up the coffers with traffic tickets. And the police/society divide continues to widen.

It may surprise some people that even in an era where citizen videos and police cameras have become commonplace—presumably putting some restraints on policy behavior—police shootings have not let up. But I am not surprised. During my own career with the New York Police Department nearly a half century ago—I am 80 now—I saw how the police brotherhood operates (another dimension of my career that the movie “Serpico” captured well), and how hard it is to reverse a decades-old ethos and presumption of innocence for police officers. Most still feel invulnerable to legal action, and the top brass and unions are resisting any changes that might put officers in jeopardy legally.

In the NYPD, even three years after a judge ordered it, police videos are still not deployed. That is typical. After the Knapp Commission was formed in 1970 to investigate police corruption—after I went to The New York Times with the story—the NYPD hardly changed (nor has it forgiven me; I have never been awarded the certificate for the Medal of Honor I won in 1970). True, the endemic extraction of bribes and payoffs of cops that I witnessed and testified to may have ended, but corruption soon moved to different forms, especially in the upper echelon, with inspectors doing favors and receiving payments, as the Daily News recently found.

Perhaps it is understandable that an agency that has enjoyed the unregulated, unbridled and undocumented use of force for decades would be reluctant to give up that power, and that it will ostracize any respectable police officer who refuses to go along and has the courage to speak out.

But these attitudes are what has led to this epidemic of unjustified police shootings. It boils down to something that psychologists call “operant conditioning.” Human behavior, like that of dogs, changes with negative or positive enforcement. If you do something wrong, you should expect to be punished. If you do it right, you get rewarded. But there has been too little punishment for what’s going on with our police, and that has reinforced their quick-trigger tendencies and perpetuated their racism, bigotry and mistreatment of blacks and other minorities. Today the policy of stop-and-frisk is said to "take guns out of the hands of criminals," but really it mostly targets people of color, even though white people own more weapons than people of color and it is easier for them to get them "legally."

Just imagine if you employed stop-and-frisk of executives as they showed up at the office each day or even once a month. How long do you think that policy would last?

And now, over the course of many decades without accountability, we are seeing the grim fruits of those policies: poor selection of recruits, poor gun training, degenerating standards for police behavior. Policing is the only job that gives you a paid vacation for killing another human being. A cop’s psyche has to rationalize these often unjustified shootings in his or her head somehow, and that’s where the support from the brotherhood comes in handy.

The only way to change this is, once again, to penetrate the brotherhood. Cops are the ultimate law, with the power to take life, and this is a brotherhood of violence in itself. Change will be slow, but errant police procedures have become a nationwide crisis, and we must make a start. We need federal control that can counter the mentality of a police fraternity that is unspoken but entrenched nationwide. We need a database and agency where whistleblowers—like the one I once was—can go to lodge their complaints without fear of retribution. That will do at least as much as videos to bring the offenders to justice—and curb the use of police violence.