I recently watched the ’70s movie Serpico, which is not a Mafia movie as so many Pacino movies were then, but a true story about a New York City police officer named Frank Serpico who happened to be pretty much the only cop on the force not taking bribes from criminals– or at least the only one who would speak out.
“Frank Serpico – The first police officer not only in the history of the New York Police Department, but in the history of any police department in the whole United States, to step forward to report and subsequently testify openly about widespread, systematic cop corruption-payoffs amounting to millions of dollars.” — Peter Maas, author of the biography Serpico
For Serpico’s efforts, he was rewarded by his fellow police officers with the most difficult beat– the narcotics one– and shot in the face with some of his fellow police officers just standing by and refusing to help. Luckily, a civilian neighbor heard the gunshots and called for help. Serpico is a true American hero when it would have been much, much easier to just go along with the crowd. It was true then and it’s true now, people like this– especially in government– are rare.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that Serpico has a blog and writes in one of his latest posts:
“I would vote Republican if Ron Paul was running.
At least we would get to the truth.”
More than anyone, Serpico knows the truth when he sees it. This week is Sunshine Week, in which journalists focus attention on the importance of open public records and the laws protecting that freedom. Needless to say, open and honest government are completely necessary for a democracy to work. You can’t vote the bastards out if you don’t know what they’ve been up to.
I’ve heard many people this week say that government agencies that lose battles for open records should pay court costs if they lose. This would all be well and good if it was in fact the agencies’ fault. It’s usually not.
These cases almost always amount to one or two bureaucrats who are trying to protect themselves by using the taxpayers’ money to outspend and outlast citizen plaintiffs in these cases. I argue that not only do we need open records for democracy to work, we need individual accountability on the part of government employees. The taxpayers shouldn’t take the fall when some political appointee doesn’t want his emails to his mistress revealed publicly and wages battle in court for years. It’s that person’s fault, and it should be that person who pays, not you or me or anyone who had nothing to do with his own unprofessional behavior. Most of the time this involves public employees conducting personal business and affairs in government offices while being paid to do a government job, which is unacceptable and means they should be fired immediately anyway– isn’t it amazing that they’re not? Only the government would defend an employee’s right to have an affair and give preferential contracts during work.
We need open records because there are still a lot of 1970s-era NYC cops who have government jobs in all bureaus and agencies, at the federal, state and local level, and there are far, far too few Serpicos.
Tags: Sunshine Week, open records, open records laws, Frank Serpico, Ron Paul, honest government
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