The NYPD Made a Porno

Years ago I worked briefly at an academic publisher and was instructed to clean out some old files. I found, buried within a stack of abandoned book projects, one entitled "Black Cop." Yes, it was going to be a book about the challenges of being an African-American police officer.

This project was, at some point in its development, deemed offensive and killed. My job was to expel it from the publisher's memory bank. I remember thinking: "This was a bad idea that was also a good idea but that most people aren't mature enough to appreciate or understand as a good idea and that's the only reason why this good idea became a bad idea." If you catch my drift.

When it comes to race, sex, and religion, emotions override logic, and the dialogue around them breaks down into controversy and shouting.

In 1976, the NYPD had a problem: porno movies were big business in NYC and the mafia controlled it. The NYPD figured the best way to end their control was to disrupt their distribution system. The best way to do this, the cops figured, was to go undercover and infiltrate the business. In order to do this they had to have something to sell the mobbed-distributors i.e a porn movie. So the NYPD made one, obviously, in secret. It was three scenes, shot at a hotel near Kennedy airport. The idea was that two undercover detectives would then go around to mob-controlled distributors, get into "business" with these guys, record their conversations/uncover their secrets, etc. and eventually arrest them. But it never happened. In the middle of this undercover operation, the existence of this movie was leaked to the press and the operation was blown. 

Controversy, outrage, and media prurience exploded.

The movie, previously a valuable tool to fight crime, became a worthless scandal. So the movie was buried in an NYPD vault, the cops who made it got reprimanded, the actors who appeared in it got their 15 minutes ... 

... and the bad guys got away. All because the press and public cared more about -- and couldn't get past -- the sex part, the porn part, and not, you know, the fighting crime part. The fact that the mob controlled a big business in NYC was less important than the fact that some people knocked boots on film. Never mind that it was done to make the city a better place!

We see this kind of misplaced idiocy in our media and public sphere today -- the obession with dumb celebrities instead of important social issues, with the President's dumb Tweets instead of his outrageous policies, etc. etc. ad infinitum. The biggest problem we face in humanity is nothing more, really, than our own collective immaturity.

So when you read the headline the "NYPD made a Porno" and are shocked, remember, the really shocking thing is how dumb and shortsighted so much of the world is -- and why things so rarely change for the better.