Patrick V. Murphy

Patrick Vincent Murphy (May 15, 1920 – December 16, 2011) served as the top law enforcement executive in New York City, Detroit, Washington, DC, and Syracuse, NY. He created the Police Executive Research Forum, an organization of police executives from the nation’s largest city, county, and state law enforcement agencies, and led the Police Foundation in a period when it published pivotal reports on issues ranging from the police use of deadly force to the efficient use of patrol resources. Murphy’s “long-range impact on American policing nationally probably will be judged by students of police history as significant as that of August Vollmer (a notable police reformer in the first half of the 20th century) or J. Edgar Hoover,” the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin commented in a 1986 cover story on the Police Foundation.

Murphy was educated in Catholic elementary and high schools in his native Brooklyn. He married Martha E. Cameron in 1945. The son, brother, and, eventually, uncle of New York City police officers, Murphy joined the New York Police Department in 1945 after serving as a Navy pilot during World War II.

His first foot patrol was in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. While on the job, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from St. John’s University and Master of Public Administration (honors) degree from City College of New York. He also graduated from the FBI National Academy.

By 1962, Murphy was a deputy inspector when the department gave him an 18-month leave of absence to become the reform police chief in Syracuse “which found itself in a nasty corruption scandal.” He returned to the NYPD in 1964 and left the next year with the rank of deputy chief.

In 1965, the Johnson administration appointed Murphy assistant director of the new Office of Law Enforcement Assistance. The U.S. Justice Department agency was located in Washington whose police department, like “many other police forces in the country, had poor relations with minority communities. But to permit the local police force, operating in the shadow of the White House, to remain in such a circumstance was … risk taking at its worst,” Murphy wrote in his memoirs. To begin to improve those relations, Murphy was appointed the District of Columbia’s first director of public safety, in charge of both the police and fire departments, in 1967.

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