Word: boing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Report to the Commissioner is the story of Bo Lockley, a self-doubting rookie cop who joins the New York City Police Department out of remorse over his brother's death in Vietnam, but also in deference to the wishes of his father, a tough police veteran. Bo had planned to file for C.O. status in the draft prior to his brother's death; in the confusion of becoming a sole surviving son and not having to tell his father of his reticence to enter the army. Bo is moved by conscience to gratify his father and join the force...
...gutsy decision for Bo, but one which ultimately brings him into conflict with his own sense of justice. His mentality is that of a left liberal college student; he is sensitively conscious of race, and of human rights. The other detectives whom he encounters in the 16th Squad don't possess quite the same sensitivities. There is Seidensticker, a mammoth black man who calls Bo by his full name. Beauregard, and who is almost paternal toward him. He patiently helps Bo adjust to a job which doesn't always run parallel to written law, but Seidensticker poses an enigma...
Seidensticker is also the most level-headed to Bo's cohorts, a fact which causes only more puzzlement. In Seidensticker, though. Mills has established a vivid character, one full of life and subject to life's pitfalls and successes. He is the best figure in the book. Others point up different facets of emotion, but none so fully and precisely as Seidensticker...
...when the higher-ups say to, he pursues the girl they asked him to find as part of their designs on promotion. He finds her with the pimp, alias The Stick, and in a wild shoot-out in The Stick's apartment a stray bullet from Bo's service revolver kills the girl. The girl is Pat Butler...
...murky realitics of city life and unfulfillment. His only fulfillment--the successful pursuit of The Stick and finding his "search object", Det. Butler--ends in disaster. A case is brought against him by the Department for Butler's death: and in the despondence of knowing he has failed, Bo hands himself in a jail cell. It is doubly ironic: a corrupt Department brings about the death of one of its few honest lieges, a death which preceeds the dismissal of the Department's homicide charges by a few hours...