By Clifford Jackson
April 14th 2026 was the 90th birthday for Francesco Vincent ” Frank” Serpico. He is someone that i first heard of when i was living in wagner houses in east harlem.
I can remember coming home from school in the 5th grade in 1971 and seeing the Knapp Commission hearings, named after Judge Whitman Knapp, who convened them at the request of Mayor John V. Lindsay. The Knapp Commission was assembled to investigate decades of police corruption and brutality that existed at the NYPD.
Patrolman Frank Serpico and Sergeant David Durk were the chief “whistleblowers.” Serpico, as a patrolman, started to report about widespread police corruption in 1967. Much of his reporting was ignored until he met with Sergeant Durk.
This led to a New York Times piece that Serpico contributed to, which detailed widespread corruption in the NYPD. The New York Times article and the hearings delineated massive corruption, including business leaders paying off cops, drug dealers who were victims of shake-downs and bribery that was rampant, which led to indictments being handed out to a number of police officials.
Frank Serpico faced hatred, isolation from his fellow officers, and essentially became a pariah within the NYPD. He was shot in the face in 1971 responding to a robbery that he and others suspect was a setup by higher-ups within the NYPD. This culture within the police was an expression of New York City’s culture of corruption that allowed for the corrupt political machine of Tammany Hall to rule NYC for more than 150 years, where Cosa Nostra, the NYPD, and City Hall worked lock in step with each other.
They said during this period of corruption of Tammany Hall in the 1930’s that “you cannot appoint a federal judge without having Frank Costello’s approval.” Frank Costello was a notorious crime boss of Cosa Nostra during that time. Frank Serpico’s courage and daunting circumstances cannot be overstated in light of all that was going on in NYC. James Baldwin wrote in 1966, “The police are an occupying force.” This is what Frank Serpico was dealing with when he became a patrolman in 1959. Because of his revelations about systemic corruption within the NYPD, Frank Serpico was forced to retire in 1972.
He has continued to speak out against the “blue wall of science” that has protected police officers when they have engaged in corruption and police brutality by lecturing around the country to young people. When Serpico was at the Brooklyn Bridge, alongside a number of NYPD officers in 2017, he spoke out on behalf of Colin Kaepernick and against racism and police brutality. Edwin Raymond, who was sworn in this year as the new sheriff of NYC, said Frank Serpico is his hero.
I agree, Frank Serpico is my personal hero also. He had the guts and courage that many of us don’t have to do what he did for almost sixty years. He had a level of honesty that is rare to see from anyone, black, white, Latino, or otherwise. He contravened the ignorance of people like journalist Rosanna Scotto and others who laud NYC’s history as great and who never speak to the issue of racism in this city. Francesco Vincent “Frank” Serpico has.
Happy belated birthday, Detective Serpico, and thank you for protecting all of us because you are “a people’s cop.”
Cliff Jackson, Larchmont