Mollen Commission

NAMED AFTER A FORMER deputy mayor of New York City, Milton Mollen, the Mollen Commission was created in 1994 to assess the extent of corruption in the New York City Police Department (NYPD). The 1980s saw a return to rampant misconduct by police officers after a purported decrease following the investigation by the Knapp Commission in the 1970s. The stakes had also escalated, moving from bribes and corruption related to vice, to huge sums of money generated by the crack cocaine trade.

Just as the NYPD was recovering from its battering at the hands of the Knapp Commission, Officer Michael Dowd and 15 to 20 fellow officers were found at the center of a criminal organization in Brooklyn. Dowd lived up to his billing as the most crooked cop in New York by continuing his illegal activities even after his arrest, reportedly corresponding with drug dealers from his jail cell. The Mollen Commission was formed one month after his arrest in an effort to determine why Dowd's superiors had not acted on 16 complaints that had been filed against him alleging that he had been taking bribes, robbing drug dealers, and selling cocaine over a period of six years.

The commission uncovered blatant corruption and cases of brutality, with officers in Brooklyn and Manhattan not only stealing and selling drugs, but sometimes shooting the dealers. The commission reported a “willful blindness” to corruption throughout the ranks of the NYPD. It further suggested that at least 40 corruption cases involving senior officers had been “buried” by the Internal Affairs Bureau, and that several previous police commissioners had been more interested in containing corruption scandals than containing corruption.

Heightened internal controls was one of two major recommendations of the Mollen Commission. The other was a proposal to increase external [Page 542]controls, through the creation of a small police commission independent of the NYPD. That body would be empowered to perform continuous assessments of the department's systems for preventing, detecting, and investigating corruption, and to conduct, whenever necessary, its own corruption investigations.