Target Blue: An Insider's View Of The NYPD – Robert Daley, 1973 ★★★½

Walking the Thin Blue Line

You are the new liberal police commissioner of the biggest, toughest city in America, and want a fresh look for your scandal-ridden department. So you give a local reporter a gun and a badge and tell him he’s now your deputy commissioner. What do you think happens next?

If you say the reporter will be out of the department and writing a witty, pungent tell-all in just over a year, give yourself a cigar. That is just what happened in the early 1970s to New York City Police Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy and New York Times reporter Robert Daley.

Beyond that, though, the story gets more complicated. Much of Target Blue takes on not the subject of bad cops but nasty citizens, dangerous and thankless assignments, and lousy bosses, Murphy in particular. For Daley, New York City cops are the true heroes, and Target Blue a title with double meaning, as they take fire both from within the department as well as outside it.

Daley records a comment one patrolman makes to his partner: “Danny, how many times do you think we maybe walked past guys with guns who were saying to themselves, should we kill ‘em or not?”

Sticking up for the regular cop in his role as a police spokesman was enough for Daley to eventually fall out of favor with Murphy and other members of the New York Police Department high command:

There was no reason why all details could not be told. There had never been. But silence had become a normal Police Department crutch. When in doubt, tell the people nothing. That was why the police were hated and distrusted everywhere in the country today.

What was the real story here? I can’t say I know for sure, but for most of the book I hardly cared. Target Blue is a gripping read that captures New York City in one of its most turbulent periods.

It was the era of the Knapp Commission investigating police corruption, among them the charges of Frank Serpico, whom Daley notes being friendly with before taking the deputy-commissioner job. It was the era when Joe Colombo and Crazy Joe Gallo joined the list of famous mobster rubouts. It was the era when a group of African-American terrorists calling themselves the Black Liberation Army randomly cut down police officers on the streets of the city.

Daley quotes a poem by a comrade of the fallen officers: “They were killed because of their color, which was neither black nor white, but blue.”

Patrick Murphy at his 1970 swearing-in as New York City's new Police Commissioner. Daley notes that while in the movies, John Wayne would have been cast for the part, the reality saw someone more likely to "have played the part of a branch manager of a bank." Behind him is Mayor John Lindsay. Image from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/nyregion/patrick-v-murphy-91-ny-police-commissioner-in-1970s-dies.html

Murphy’s arrival as police commissioner was to signal an era of unprecedented accountability for the NYPD. Daley notes how once upon a time, not long ago, cops had beaten suspects with brain-scrambling slapjacks:

The inspector or the chief heading up the investigation would announce, “I want this case broken,” and then he would go home. He never gave any order, but it was an order nonetheless: Bring in the guys who break heads. This was considered a “scientific” investigation. While it was going on, calls would sometimes come in from across the street complaining about the noise from the victim.

Now the department’s chief of detectives found himself turning in his gun and badge over accepting an $84 meal from a restaurant. Then the Knapp Commission began to expose widespread bribery and shakedowns, though in Daley’s account doing so with an unpardonably broad brush that seemed to exonerate the worst corruption cases as long as they played ball with the commission.

“These people would round out the picture which the Knapp Commission was attempting to present: that corruption within the Police Department was not a question of a few rotten apples, but rather a long, sordid story of a rotten barrel,” Daley writes.

Add to that the targeted assassinations by the Black Liberation Army, and Daley quickly found himself transformed from muckraker to an unapologetic defender of the badge. Even his relationships with a pair of whistleblower officers, Serpico and Sergeant David Durk, grew distant. So did Daley’s connection to Murphy, whom he found vague and too quick to turn on fellow cops.

I wish Daley had been more precise about what drew him away from the whistleblowers, as he clearly joined the department believing them on the right path. Target Blue doesn’t spend much time on that kind of introspection. It’s a big magilla of a book that extends its lumpy narrative in multiple directions. One minute you are watching footage of an Italian-American rally where one of the biggest crime bosses in the city, Joe Colombo, is shot nearly brain-dead. The next you are at a murder scene where a young flight attendant is minutely examined and evidence of her brutal rape is collected.

Patrolman Thomas Courson delivers a baby and then kills a gunman during a single shift. “That one tour epitomizes this whole job. Within three hours you can watch a life come into the world, and then watch one go out,” Courson explains.

Much of the time is spent recording the byzantine dealings at One Police Plaza, as Murphy sets about removing aged chiefs and commanders and replacing them with his kind of people. Daley understands the impulse, but comes to resent the practice. Too many good men are tossed to the curb. Meanwhile, he comes to find Murphy a less-than-inspiring figure.

Murphy’s command style as described by Daley is to send out memos, lots of memos, and then do nothing further about most of them. His conversations tend to the elliptical, and focused more on presenting himself as a reformer than understanding the real situation at his department:

It always seemed to me that Murphy was not really interested in people, but rather in concepts. Murphy declined to meet other human beings on any sort of emotional level.

For Murphy, as well as other police leaders and New York City Mayor John Lindsay, it all boils down to power, and the appearance of having it, which is interchangeable from the thing itself. Meanwhile, the chance to do some good with that power is left wanting.

Daley’s abilities as a writer (he went on to write successful police-centered fiction as well as non-fiction such as the book which was made into the movie Prince Of The City) make this a quick, absorbing read even if you aren’t quite sure about the points he is making. Did he think the Knapp Commission was a good thing, a travesty, or both? What was his view of the corruption charges brought up by Serpico and Durk? He describes both men at length as charming headcases but seems untouched by their issues with the department, even when Frank Serpico is shot in the head during a bust where he was left suspiciously without backup.

Frank Serpico (at right) meets the press after testifying against police corruption at the Knapp Commission hearings. After recovering from a gunshot wound to the head, Serpico left the force. Daley recalls much drama about whether Serpico would agree to shave his beard. Image from http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/frank-serpico-reflects-knapp-commission-exposing-corruption-article-1.3179229

“I can only tell you that when word came in that Serpico had been shot, this building shook,” one ranking police official tells Daley. “We were terrified that a cop had done it.”

Daley’s powers of observation find purchase when he lights upon some of the rare characters in the department hierarchy, like the detective commander busted for the $84 meal (and later cleared), Albert Seedman:

Seedman was the only high-ranking policeman that I knew of who wore jewelry, or monogrammed shirts either; he was one of the few to wear a suede holster and carry a hammerless revolver, and he was a Jew, and it sometimes seemed amazing that such a man had ever risen to the top of what was basically an Irish Catholic police department.  

He also tells an immersive story about the actions of the Black Liberation Army, a motley crew who set about ambushing police officers in horrific ways. For some reason, the cops they end up killing turn out to be two pairs of black and white officers working together.

Daley puts you on the crime scenes, sparing few details in describing their bullet-ridden bodies.

Never mind corruption; the police problem of the early 1970s centered, as it does today, on race. Daley is unencumbered by political correctness then or now in laying out the bleak situation:

There were altogether 1466 criminal homicides recorded in New York in 1971. More than half the corpses, 784, were black. The rest of the racial breakdown of the victims went this way: 370 white, 306 Hispanic, 6 miscellaneous. So the violence in the black precincts was out of all proportion to the population of the city, though perfectly in tune with the poverty of those precincts, and with the misery, the hopelessness, and the drugs.

In the end, a shooting at a black mosque which left one officer dead and another injured proved the final straw for Daley. He wanted to go public with an account of it being an ambush, but found himself overruled by Murphy and Lindsay, who feared a race war. He resigned soon after.

Can an honest cop get an even break in such a city, especially when he’s only been on the job a year? The answer is a firm, sad no. Target Blue tells a grim story, and tells it well.