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Blondie took the oath in early 1977. The department he joined had a long history of corruption. A common joke had it that Philadelphia's kids could play cops and robbers at the same time. This was especially true in the 1970s. The mayor was former police commissioner Frank Rizzo, who had promised to "make Attila the Hun look like a faggot" if he won election. "The way to treat criminals," Rizzo explained, is "spacco il capa" (bust their heads). Rizzo was as good as his word. A study for the U.S. Justice Department found that while individual Philadelphia police officers made no more arrests than New York City cops, during Rizzo's eight years as mayor they were 37 times as likely to shoot unarmed citizens fleeing the site of nonviolent crimes.
Blondie spent 14 weeks at the police academy. "It was mostly firearms training, first aid and war stories," he says. "They taught a bit about things like probable cause--just to say they had taught it--but the message was clear: What you really do as a cop you learn on the street from the veterans, and you could be sure, as they said, that it was nothing like what you learned at the academy."
It wasn't. Three weeks into his new career, and teamed with a veteran officer, Blondie made his first arrest; he nabbed a rape suspect. "Nothing fit," Blondie recalls now. "The clothes description over the radio wasn't like what our guy had on, and he wasn't sweating. He said he was just standing outside his own home, which turned out to be true. But the victim ID'd him, so we took him anyway. She was so hysterical; she would have identified anyone." When Blondie vociferously questioned the arrest, he was told to "shut up, listen and learn." He then watched as the original description was altered to fit the suspect, who was held for eight months until the victim recanted her identification.
"The pressure is to produce, to show activity, to get the collars," says Blondie today. "It's all about numbers, like the body count in Vietnam. The rest of the system determines if you got the right guy or not."
Blondie learned a lot, very quickly. Beating a suspect into a confession? O.K. Stealing from a bad guy? Fine. But he also learned that even the shadow world had its rules. "The first is, keep it in the ghetto. In the good areas, you don't go stopping people without cause," he says. "Second, you don't take money to let a criminal enterprise continue. And third, you don't frame an innocent person." Blondie says he and his crew never "planted stuff" on an innocent person. If he were that kind of cop, he insists, "then we would have put drugs on Colbert, and I wouldn't be talking to you from behind bars right now. We could have created a his-word-vs.-our-word thing, and we would have got off." But aside from the lines you don't cross, says Blondie, "how you get a bad guy, if he really is a bad guy, is pretty much your own business. Your job is to get him. Period."