Patrick Vincent Murphy served as the top law enforcement executive in
New York City,
Detroit,
Washington, DC, and
Syracuse, NY died from a heart attack he was 91.. He created the
Police Executive Research Forum, an organization of police executives from the nation’s largest city, county, and state law enforcement agencies, and led the
Police Foundation
in a period when it published pivotal reports on issues ranging from
the police use of deadly force to the efficient use of patrol resources.
Murphy’s “long-range impact on American policing nationally probably
will be judged by students of police history as significant as that of
August Vollmer (a notable police reformer in the first half of the 20th century) or
J. Edgar Hoover,” the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin commented in a 1986 cover story on the Police Foundation.
[1]
(May 15, 1920 – December 16, 2011)
Education and Early Years
Murphy was educated in Catholic elementary and high schools in his
native Brooklyn. He married Martha E. Cameron in 1945. The son, brother,
and, eventually, uncle of New York City police officers, Murphy joined
the
New York Police Department in 1945 after serving as a Navy pilot during
World War II.
His first foot patrol was in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. While on the job, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from
St. John’s University and Master of Public Administration (honors) degree from
City College of New York. He also graduated from the FBI National Academy.
By 1962, Murphy was a deputy inspector when the department gave him
an 18-month leave of absence to become the reform police chief in
Syracuse “which found itself in a nasty corruption scandal.”
[2] He returned to the NYPD in 1964 and left the next year with the rank of deputy chief.
Washington DC and Detroit
In 1965, the
Johnson administration appointed Murphy assistant director of the new Office of Law Enforcement Assistance. The
U.S. Justice Department agency was located in Washington whose
police department,
like “many other police forces in the country, had poor relations with
minority communities. But to permit the local police force, operating in
the shadow of the White House, to remain in such a circumstance was …
risk taking at its worst,” Murphy wrote in his memoirs.
[3]
To begin to improve those relations, Murphy was appointed the District
of Columbia’s first director of public safety, in charge of both the
police and fire departments, in 1967.
The jobs in Syracuse and Washington underscored two of Murphy’s
principal concerns. Throughout his “illustrious career in policing,
Murphy earned a reputation as a fierce advocate of reform, particularly
with regard to police corruption and race relations,” according to
Charles R. Epp, a public affairs professor at the University of Kansas.
[4]
In his memoirs, Murphy notes he fought off strenuous resistance from
his police chief and a powerful congressional chairman whose committee
controlled the DC department to appoint Jerry Wilson, a talented young
commander, as assistant chief of field operations. He says that Wilson
emphasized restraint in planning and implementing major changes for the
prevention and control of disorders. Murphy credits these changes with
minimizing violence in the
April 1968 DC rioting that followed the assassination of
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.[5]
“Murphy dispersed the mob as gently, and with as few arrests, as
possible,” the New York Times reported. “His statement that he would
resign rather than order the shootings of looters was widely quoted,
with approval in liberal circles and as a sure sign of anarchy by the
right.”
[6]
Congress established the
Law Enforcement Assistance Administration
in 1968 to fund state and local law enforcement agencies and
crime-fighting research and development programs. In October, the
Johnson administration nominated Murphy to be the agency’s first leader.
But the Senate was bogged down in other matters and Murphy was never
confirmed. He left his post a few months after the start of the
Nixon administration in 1969 and served as a consultant to the Washington, DC-based
Urban Institute. Then Mayor
Roman S. Gribbs
summoned Murphy to become police commissioner in Detroit in the first
days of 1970, but a burgeoning scandal in his home NYPD soon drew him
from Detroit.
Return to New York
In April, 1970 the
New York Times
launched a series of articles that, in the words of series author David
Burnham, charged that “policemen in the city were receiving millions of
dollars in graft and that top police officials and members of Mayor
John V. Lindsay’s staff had ignored specific allegations of grafting.”
[7]
Lindsay sought out a corruption-fighter to run the department and six
months after the scandal broke, Murphy returned to the NYPD as
commissioner.
Murphy quickly began “changing his department irrevocably … (he) put
in place systems to hold supervisors and administrators strictly
accountable for the integrity and civility of their personnel… He
rewarded cops who turned in corrupt or brutal colleagues and punished
those who, although personally honest, looked the other way when they
learned of misconduct,” according to criminal justice scholars Jerome H.
Skolnick and James J. Fyfe. They write that “Murphy used his three and a
half years in office to create an environment that loudly and clearly
condemned abusive police conduct, those who engage in it and – equally
important – those who tolerate it.”
[8]
In August 1972, Murphy introduced a new policy restricting “the use
of deadly force to situations involving the defense of life, replacing
the traditional ‘fleeing felon’ rule. The policy also prohibited
discharging firearms as warning shots, as calls for assistance, or at or
from moving vehicles,” writes Samuel Walker, a criminal justice
professor at the University of Nebraska. Murphy’s defense-of-life policy
“was a radical innovation. To be fair, there were undoubtedly other law
enforcement agencies that already had restrictive policies... The
important point, however, is that none had the lasting national impact
on policy that New York City’s had. Within a matter of a few years, the
defense-of-life policy was the standard policy in major cities across
the country.”
[9]
Police Foundation
In late 1973, Murphy became president of the
Police Foundation, which the
Ford Foundation established in 1970 with a $30 million commitment. The purpose was to foster innovation and improvement in American policing.
Under Murphy’s watch, the foundation published more than 30 books and
reports on matters ranging from police corruption to firearm abuse to
policewomen on patrol to domestic violence and the police. A study on
the police use of deadly force found that in the mid-1970s police
agencies differed widely in their policies governing the use of deadly
force, but that there appeared to be increased restraint in police use
of firearms.
Perhaps the most notable of its publications was the report of a foundation experiment set in
Kansas City, Missouri,
that concluded that the accepted police strategy of routine preventive
patrol in cars had no significant effect on crime rates, citizen fear of
crime, or citizen satisfaction with police service.
[10]
These results “suggested that it is not sufficient to merely assign
unformed officers to random patrol and that more sophisticated means of
deploying personnel may be necessary,” according to Police
Administration.
[11]
Not all of the foundation’s resources went to research. In 1975,
Murphy enlisted the help of ten police chiefs from large jurisdictions
around the country to help him create the
Police Executive Research Forum.
The foundation provided generous start-up funding, and the forum was
formally incorporated in 1977. Murphy envisioned an organization the
forum has become – in its words on its web site, “a national membership
organization of progressive police executives from the largest city,
county, and state law enforcement agencies … dedicated to improving
policing and advancing professionalism through research and involvement
in public policy debate.”
[12] The forum now has 1,500 general and subscribing members.
During Murphy’s tenure, the foundation also assisted in the development of the
National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE) and assembled the
National Advisory Commission on Higher Education for Police Officers. The commission’s 300-page report issued 43 recommendations designed to upgrade the quality of police higher education.
[13]
At the 1980 conference of the
International Association of Chiefs of Police,
delegates rejected by a 4-1 margin a resolution introduced by Murphy
calling for departmental restrictions on the use of deadly force.
Instead, the delegates affirmed the traditional fleeing felon rule.
Murphy continued to speak out on the matter and in 1982 the IACP
leadership censured him “for his ongoing criticism of traditional police
practices,” Epp writes. “The issue was widely covered in terms
unfavorable to the IACP. The New York Times gave front-page coverage to
the story on July 8, 1982.” About 150 similar stories, “all unfavorable
to the IACP, appeared in other newspaper and magazines.” Several
large-city police chiefs opposed the IACP’s censure of Murphy and the
executive directors of the
National League of Cities, the
International City Management Association, and the
United States Conference of Mayors issued a letter criticizing the action.
[14]
In 1985, the Supreme Court in
Tennessee v. Garner
decreed that it was reasonable “for the police to use deadly force to
defend life or to apprehend armed and dangerous felony suspects, but
shooting nonviolent fleeing property crime suspects was a form of
unreasonable seizure that violated the Fourth Amendment and that
therefore must be forbidden.”
[15] This was in line with the shooting policy Murphy introduced to NYPD in 1972.
Murphy retired from the foundation in 1985. He taught at
John Jay College of Criminal Justice from 1985–87 and was director of the police policy board of the United States Conference of Mayors from 1985-98.
Death and legacy
With his wife, Murphy had eight children, 21 grandchildren, and 17
great grandchildren at the time of his death. He died in 2011 at North
Carolina of complications from a heart attack.
[16] He was 91.
The Patrick V. Murphy Papers are housed in the Special Collections of the Lloyd Sealy Library,
John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
[17]
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