Coming to the Audience Network on DIRECTV tomorrow, Saturday, December 20: PATROLMAN P
Ido Mizrahy’s exploration of an infamous police corruption scandal debuted at DOC NYC last year. It has also screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival, and now makes its broadcast debut.
In the early 1970s, then-NYC Mayor John Lindsay formed the Knapp Commission to investigate the NYPD as a response to officer Frank Serpico’s participation in a New York Times story making allegations of widespread corruption in the force. Mizrahy’s film focuses on NYPD officer Bill Phillips, who was compelled to wear a wire to record evidence of illegal police activity for the Knapp Commission after he himself was caught taking bribes. Breaking the code of police brotherhood by ratting out his fellow cops, Phillips alleges he was later set up to take the fall for a double homicide of a pimp and a prostitute, for which he was sentenced to over 30 years in prison. Working with New York magazine reporter Geoffrey Gray, who also occasionally narrates, Mizrahy follows the parallel story of the corrupt 1970s NYPD, full of fantastic archival footage of a seedy, decaying NYC, and the filmmaker’s own efforts to untangle fact from fiction in the charismatic Phillips’ claims of a police payback conspiracy that led to his present state – even resorting to the use of a lie detector. The result is a layered investigation that presents provocative questions about a case which has no simple answers.
what (not) to doc 