Mollen Commission, the

The Mollen Commission was established by then-New York City Mayor David N. Dinkins in 1992 to investigate alleged police corruption in several New York Police Department (NYPD) precincts after an NYPD officer named Michael Dowd, along with five other officers, was arrested in the suburban area where he lived by Suffolk County Police for trafficking illegal narcotics inside and outside of New York City. The Mollen Commission, empowered by a mayoral executive order, was a panel of investigators comprised mainly of attorneys that was independent of the New York City government and the NYPD.

The Mollen Commission was named after the chairperson, Milton Mollen, who was a deputy mayor in New York City and a retired New York State appellate judge. The Mollen Commission held publicly televised hearings in September and October 1993 that detailed corrupt activities related mainly to illegal narcotics, falsifying police testimony, and excessive use of force. (These tapes are now located at the Lloyd George Sealy Library at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.) Most of the police officers involved and arrested as a result of the corrupt activities were front-line patrol officers working in patrol units in one of the city's most troubled areas. After the hearings, the Mollen Commission published a final report in July 1994. The Commission concluded that the corrupt activities were the result of corruption-prone opportunities from the sudden influx of crack cocaine and the decentralized anticorruption units of the NYPD. The Mollen Commission did not find that corruption was systemic in the NYPD, as had previous corruption investigations of the NYPD, such as the Knapp Commission. The Mollen Commission found that corrupt activities were the actions of a “crew” operation; a small group of police officers usually working the same assignment and during the same work hours. The Mollen Commission made 139 recommendations related to police personnel matters such as selection and recruitment; improvement of hiring standards; modification of internal investigation procedures; and creation of a permanent, independent commission to investigate police misconduct.

The enormity of New York City, the size of the NYPD, and New York City's preeminence as the media capital of the world intensified the scrutiny of the NYPD and the NYPD's police officers. The NYPD, as a formal police agency, was chartered and centralized in 1844. Early NYPD “patrolmen,” as they were known then, were appointed at the request of local ward politicians and were expected to protect the illegal rackets of the ward politician who appointed the patrolmen, particularly the vice rackets, which, at that time, consisted mainly of selling alcohol illegally and prostitution-related criminal activity. One of the earliest police reformers in New York City, future president Theodore Roosevelt, was the police commissioner of New York City. Roosevelt, along with a reform-minded clergy official, Charles Henry Parkhurst, initiated the Lexow Committee to investigate police corruption in New York City. According to the Lexow Committee's findings, police corruption in New York City was firmly enmeshed in local government politics. Other commissions that investigated police misconduct in the NYPD followed in 1913, 1930, and 1950.

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