Typical is the gross and widespread police corruption revealed by New York city’s Knapp investigating committee during October 1971. At one hearing a former policeman charged that in one precinct of seventy policemen there were only two honest cops, only two that refused bribes.

As former New York city Councilman Earl Brown wrote in the New York Times, November 2, 1971, “The problem is not police corruption but a lawless society. . . . To demand that the cop on the beat . . . be incorruptible is to demand more than others are willing to live up to. When Americans demand law and order they mean it for somebody else, not themselves. The well-to-do middle-class parent that offers a policeman a bribe not to arrest his son . . . ignores the fact that he is committing a crime. . . . How can anyone expect the cops to be incorruptible” when so many other people are corrupt?