If you’re familiar with Don Winslow’s novel The Force [wc] it may feel as though The Seven Five [wc] is about some of the characters in the book.
In the 1980s the New York City Police Department got so corrupt, in some districts, that police officers were using cop cars to provide transportation for cocaine; after all, it’s one way to move product without getting stopped by the police. It took a while for the corruption to get to epic proportions and – never mind that huge swaths of the police department were participating, the blame came down on one cop who allegedly started it all, Michael Dowd
Dowd and his crew did it all: theft, extortion, prostitution, dealing drugs, weapons, testilying. When he was finally prosecuted for his crimes, he got a 12 year sentence – and actually spent it in prison. Never mind that he’d have been expected to spend the rest of his life in prison, if he was an actual cocaine dealer, who moved that much cocaine, except he was a cop who was moving cocaine so he was only busted for racketeering.
If you want an opportunity to dislike cops a bit more, I recommend The Seven Five – it starts out corrupt and nasty and gets worse and worse. The cops are like a stupid version of Goodfellas – stupid because they don’t think they’ll ever get caught, because they’re cops. During the documentary, Dowd repeatedly tries to make the case that being a Brooklyn cop is so dangerous that it’s necessary to build an internal support network of other cops; cops that are also “on the take.” I read Peter Maas’ Serpico [wc] around the time it came out (1971) and it doesn’t sound like NYPD managed to learn anything. Of course they didn’t – the whole system of policing in New York is corrupt – they’re just playing whac-a-mole trying to catch the more extreme outliers. Ironically, American conservatives like to play off the lawlessness and corruption of Mexico’s narcotics-plagued regime and police, but New York City’s police don’t seem much better.
Dowd’s corruption managed to shock me, even in the era of Donald Trump and his crime family. For example, the police get called in to a shooting and discover it was a drug-related gang shooting. There is a large gym bag full of money. The cops write up the murder and toss the money in the back of the car to divide up later.
The way the other cops in the documentary describe it, Dowd was the root of all evil: he’s the one who teased the other “good” cops with money and nice things. Eventually they “succumbed” to his evil influence.
In the closet’s the anti-crime team. And the guy picks up a bag – it’s a green fuckin’ garbage bag filled with cash. So I look at him, he looks at me, and I go, “what the fuck you gonna do, spend a whole day vouchering cash?” Yeah, fuck it.
I’m generally fascinated by documentaries of this sort, [stderr] because it displays the self-justifying nature of people’s world view. Robert MacNamara in The Fog Of War describes how Vietnam sucked America in – as if it was never a consequence of America’s choices. Dowd throws up the justification that it’d take all day to do the paperwork on a bag of money, instead of just stealing it. A lazy cop might have thought, “good, I get to spend all day in a nice air-conditioned office counting money and noting down serial numbers, instead of being out on the street, working.” These documentaries become analyses of motivated reasoning: how we successively decide that things are OK, until we’ve gotten way past the point where we know they’re OK.
For another example: there’s a moment where Dowd is underpaid by one of the criminals he’s shaking down. He gets very upset because the guy he’s ripping off tried to rip him off:
I’m a New York City cop, I’m taking a risk of going to jail for a long period of time, and you’re going to short me a dime? There’s a line he cannot cross.
See, it’s honor, not greed. Dowd and his partner respond by harassing the dealer’s customers until they start to cut into his business and he pays them. Honor satisfied.
At various points in the documentary, the cops talk about how they needed to make sure other cops didn’t “rat” them out. In case you’re confused, “ratting” means telling internal affairs that you saw a cop being corrupt – so, in these cops’ terms, a good cop won’t rat out another good cop while he’s hauling a half kilo of cocaine. Thus, the potential “rat” is placed in a situation where they are in a non-existent moral dilemma: do they match the assumption of corruption made by the other cops, or do they match the assumption of honesty made by internal affairs? How does a cop establish a reputation on the force for being corrupt, but nobody says anything until an outsider comes and investigates and the whole pustule bursts in recrimination?
What seems to happen, inevitably, is that people get sucked deeper and deeper into their bad choices until they’re in over their heads and start making stupid decisions. It’s not hubris, it’s just sad and lame. Spoiler: if you’re a corrupt cop, don’t buy a swimming pool and a corvette.
The Seven Five is interesting and revealing, though the topic has lost its capacity to shock me. It’s well-assembled and the interviews are interesting. There are some beautiful photos of 80’s New York, interspersed in the story, which made me nostalgic. If you’re a fan of documentary and want a good exploration of what a “slippery slope” looks like, this is a film for you.
Winslow’s The Force deals well with the trope of cops handing envelopes of cash up their chain of command, “to celebrate holidays.” What it’s actually doing is buying other people into the corruption – they have to know that a fat envelope full of cash was not obtained honestly. By taking the envelope they become party to the corruption. But, in a case like Dowd’s, he’s the one guy who’s determined to be at fault and the system comes down on him like a great big hammer-slap on the wrist. All the others get to finish their careers and retire on the taxpayer’s nickel.
Frank Serpico is 82.
Here’s an interview with Dowd. [nymag]
I used to take a fair amount of drugs, so I’ve known my share of drug dealers over the years. It’s a well-known fact, in the scene, that nobody who ever got busted with a sizeable quantity ever got charged for anything like the amount they actually had – usually it was less than 10%. What do you think happens to the rest?
Dunc@#1:
What do you think happens to the rest?
It winds back up on the street. In The Seven Five the whole loop is pretty thoroughly explored. Eventually the cops teamed up with a major drug dealer and would sieze his competitors’ drugs, turn them over to him, and he’d put the drugs back on the street and cut the cops in for a chunk of the profits.
I find it frustrating that so many crime-related problems could be solved by simply decriminalizing recreational drug usage and prostitution. But no, virtuous Christians would never allow that.
That’s just sad. If drugs could be legally purchased in normal shops, there’d be quality control for the consumer and no more easily available income for criminal gangs. If sex work was legal, there’d be less demand for human trafficking and safer working conditions for sex workers. Instead of dealing with violent pimps, sex workers could simply sign legal work contracts with people who owned brothels. Thus they’d be safe and protected from violence and also able to sue an employee or a client who fails to pay their salary.
It’s as if people, who theoretically oppose such crimes, wanted human trafficking and street gangs to exist. It’s just sad and frustrating.
Self-justifying nature of people’s world view? Are you sure these people actually believe their own excuses? I’d assume that they know damn well what they are doing, it’s just that when they get caught they try to invent bullshit excuses for those who start interrogating them.
Marcus, @ #2: Yeah, that was a rhetorical question.
Re: Ieva Skrebele (#3):
Maybe I’m missing a rhetorical question now, but they probably do, at least to a degree. Convincing oneself that doing something wrong or bad is very human indeed. We’re convincing ourselves to do X even though we know it is a bad idea, all the time. (It might be wrong in a host of different ways, not just morally or legally so) Some of the most popular excuses are, “everyone’s doing it”, “noone will ever know”, and a thousand variations of, “on the whole it doesn’t really matter”. That last one is probably true on average. Most of us aren’t cops or invading foreign countries, and flirting with corruption tends to amount to something of the order of not putting back that borrowed pen.
But I strongly suspect this self-persuasion works on any scale, although it probably takes a lot of small steps to get to the really dubious stuff. Dowd probably didn’t start with gym bags of money on his first day but worked his way up. The real pros can stand guard at a concentration camp or work at a torture facility, thinking theirs is a noble and worthwhile profession. I sincerely hope it takes a lot of work to reach that mental state, but either way they did and do.
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Regarding legalisation, I generally agree with you but don’t think it’s quite as easy as you make it sound.
With drugs I’m generally sceptic since I’m opposed to the whole concept. I don’t like the idea of mind-altering substances at all – clearly personal and no basis for law – but there’s the other issue that they tend to be addictive and damaging to your health. I don’t like the idea of that being something you casually buy in the shops, but now we’re headed toward the classic argument over where to draw the line, e.g. with tobacco and alcohol. (I’d suggest we skip over that argument here)
Meanwhile legalising prostitution seems to be only partially effective. For example it’s legal in Germany and I think the argument to decriminalise it was actually that it puts people in vulnerable positions and leads to exploitation. However, trafficking and exploitation are apparently still a problem on a large scale. The problem may have been reduced but it’s still a big one. If I recall correctly critics claimed that the legislation is flawed, so that it now provides effective cover to traffickers. That must be the worst possible outcome for any attempt at legalisation.
Whatever the reasons, you still get a lot of people trapped in the classic pattern of trafficking victims everywhere: Disadvantaged people (i.e. women) from abroad are offered the “opportunity” to work in Germany. Before they know it they’re trapped in effective slavery, being sexually abused. Meanwhile their money goes to someone else and they don’t know how to reach out for help and have no means to get out.
Again, just to clarify: I’m in favour of decriminalising things that (ideally) don’t hurt anyone, or which are criminal because of some high-minded and / or religiously inspired notions of “morality”. I just wish the results were better and I’m not sure it’s always possible to get a “good” result.
@5 Komarov
Providing cover for traffickers is far from the worst effect prostitution legislation can do. Significantly worse is criminalizing being trafficked, and that’s a routine failure condition in legal systems that criminalize prostitution. It theoretically doesn’t have to be, but pretty reliably ends up that way.
Re: Knabb (#6):
Yes, I was too focussed on the legalisation side and ended up neglecting the consequences of prohibition, which are just as bad or worse for the vicitms. Thanks for pointing that out.