Even so, in terms of cleaning up the police department, Serpico's efforts were not totally in vain. Although the department ignored him as best it could for as long as possible, he finally went to the newspapers and generated enough publicity to bring about some temporary reforms. However, the point here is that he had to fight against the system just to get it to live up to its own stated standards. He was peculiarly obsessed with the notion that the government should obey the law. He discovered the hard way that the Nixonian doctrine that officials are above the law is rather common in American life, and this wisdom and his integrity was lost to the nation when he went into self-assumed exile in Europe.

In this vein, a person who insists on asserting his integrity in a world of cons and scams really can be annoying. An Hispanic, with the unlikely name of Henry Harrison, proved this point when he became a fly in the ointment of integration by insisting on doing what he felt was right. In 1984, Mr. Harrison was a fireman in Miami when he asked his superiors to remove his name from a promotion list so that he would not advance over colleagues he considered more deserving. Chief Ken McCullogh expressed shock and confusion over Harrison's reluctance to take advantage of Affirmative Action guidelines to move ahead of fellow workers who had scored higher in the qualification process. From Harrison's standpoint, his decision might be considered stupid, in that he was sacrificing his own advancement for the sake of creating a more efficient fire department. The ironic point is that he had to do this in the face of regulations and expectations of the system, which was set up to promote people according to qualities irrelevant to job performance. How nice it might be if advancement of individuals within a group and improvement of group efficiency went together rather than being at odds with one another.

As vexing as officer Serpico's acts of conscience were for the establishment, Mr. Harrison's was even more so because he showed that simply obeying or abiding by the laws and rules is not enough if those regulations themselves are unconscionable. Beyond commandments inscribed in stone, Constitutions written on parchment and laws compiled in books, there is a spirit which animates a culture. It is this which provides an ethical and moral basis for judging the stupidity of official schemas. The irony inherent in culture is that our religious beliefs are so often at odds with our behavioral norms.

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