Mario Biaggi was the most decorated member of the New York Police Department when he retired in 1965. Over the course of more than two decades as a cop, he shot and killed multiple suspects, including one who tried, but failed, to carjack him, and he was wounded eleven times, once by a runaway horse that left him with a lifelong limp. In 1968, Biaggi was elected to Congress as a Democrat, flipping a Republican stronghold in the Bronx, and bringing the movement for police power to Capitol Hill.

Biaggi was the first of a new breed of tough-on-crime northern Democrat. He spent his political career championing police priorities in Washington, choreographing lobbying efforts, and uplifting the police officer’s perspective at committee hearings. “He was recognized as the guy to go to if you had a concern about law enforcement,” his aide Craig W. Floyd recalled.

Biaggi’s rise went hand-in-hand not just with law and order politics but with a shift in the balance of power within the police profession writ large—away from the respected chiefs, and toward the irascible rank and file and the unions that represented them. Biaggi’s achievement was to make rank-and-file police more cohesive, effective, and able to get what they wanted in the halls of Congress as never before. His major legislative accomplishments included death benefits for families of slain police officers and the founding of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, but the bill that best encapsulated the growing influence of police in politics was Biaggi’s ban on armor-piercing bullets. The progenitors of this movement called their political influence Blue Power. The term signified their methods as well as their goal.

Violence against police had energized Blue Power. Fear of getting shot in the line of duty, and anger when shootings of officers did occur, accelerated police involvement in politics at the municipal level in the late 1960s. Police organized in city after city in the decade after the Detroit and Newark uprisings, as 1,077 police across the country were killed. Threats to police, no matter how remote, became a potent organizing tool.

In the decade prior to the urban conflagrations of 1967, police strikes were anathema, and police unions were virtually nonexistent. Politicians all but ignored the interests of police, especially at the federal level. But the new mobilization was not only about officer protection. After the Civil Rights movement advanced racial equality, Blue Power asserted a new civic hierarchy. Its core principles were that police should not genuflect to elected officials or heed civilian oversight, that rank-and-file officers should be handsomely compensated for their work, and that cops should be treated as experts on crime and public safety.

The most straightforward response to violence directed at police was to make cops bulletproof. Through a range of funding streams, many big-city police departments were able to obtain some form of soft body armor for their officers beginning in the mid-1970s. Taking officer safety seriously was a crucial political win, but it was not enough for Blue Power.

Police union leaders soon concocted a new worry, and Mario Biaggi followed their lead. Certain bullets, designed to penetrate vehicle doors or windshields, were now available on the retail market. These bullets could pose a danger to officers even if they were protected by Kevlar.

These specialized bullets gained the national spotlight in January 1982, when NBC ran a television news segment focusing on a brass bullet that was coated in Teflon. No clear data existed to prove that this rare projectile had yet been involved in the killing of an officer at the time that NBC drew attention to it. But Biaggi seized the opportunity. He introduced the Law Enforcement Officers Protection Act in February 1982 to ban the bullets.

Biaggi anticipated that the National Rifle Association and police organizations would collaborate. He was wrong. The rifle association was critical of the documentary, arguing that it revealed information to the general public that only specialists needed to know. Associate Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani claimed that even debating a ban “will encourage assassins and other criminals to search out these particularly dangerous classes of ammunition.” Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association’s lobbying arm suggested the bill would “deprive firearm owners of the use of their weapons.”

In response, bill supporters started to use a phrase that was soon on the lips of newscasters everywhere: “cop-killer bullets.”

Two years later, the Reagan administration finally introduced its own NRA-friendly version of the bullet ban. In place of Biaggi’s commonsense definition of an armor-piercing bullet as a bullet that could pierce armor, the administration followed the National Rifle Association’s guidance to substitute a definition based on the metallic composition of the slug. It pointedly left existing bullet stock unregulated.

Mario Biaggi never deviated from his script: he wanted to pass a bill that would protect officers. Still, the ban itself was only one goal of the legislative process. The fight to pass it would also serve to unify warring police organizations. Because Biaggi’s ban had failed to proceed year after year, each time he reintroduced it he had a fresh opportunity to bring police organizations into his coalition. Biaggi gathered eight police groups one year, then a dozen the next. He told them, as his speaking notes recorded: “We’re here to reach agreement on course of action to take—unity is essential—law enforcement community cannot afford to be split on this issue.”

Success required that police play an active role, walking the halls of the congressional office buildings while in uniform, in a “coordinated lobbying effort.” The plan was to have each group “be responsible for lobbying” specific members of Congress and developing the crucial count of how a vote would play out. Further, Floyd provided action items for the organizations’ leaders, including the joint letter they would eventually send to President Reagan. He also suggested that cops could author op-eds and letters to the editor and should meet with their local congressional representatives at home, where their organizations were strongest.

Biaggi worked to consolidate police groups behind his bill, rather than the administration’s version. But when police groups sent their joint letter to President Reagan, urging his support for Biaggi’s bullet ban, in January 1985, not every group was on board, with some organizations reluctant to withdraw support for Reagan’s bill that they had previously committed. Over the Fraternal Order of Police’s objections, Biaggi remained insistent: the “law enforcement community cannot afford to be split” over details. He was determined to unite police into a single lobbying force.

By November 1985, Biaggi had managed to unite a dozen groups that were otherwise typically at odds. All supported Biaggi’s ban on sales, rather than the more limited ban on manufacture and import that the Reagan administration advocated. It was time to take the fight to the gun industry.

At the same time Biaggi was pushing to ban armor-piercing bullets, the National Rifle Association was launching its largest effort to loosen gun laws since Congress tightened restrictions on handguns in 1968. The bill, the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act, was at once tough on crime and pro-gun, increasing penalties for the use of a gun in drug-trafficking offenses while repealing some record-keeping requirements on bullet sales and making it easier to sell firearms across state lines, allowing unlicensed “hobbyists” to sell firearms at gun shows.

The National Rifle Association attempted to sow discord, claiming that rank-and-file cops were far more favorably disposed toward gun rights than the association leaders who claimed to represent them. There was some truth to this claim—rank-and-file officers complained directly to Biaggi that his campaign was publicizing their vulnerabilities, and that his “big mouth” was responsible for getting officers killed. Conservative Republican Dick Armey of Texas claimed to speak on behalf of police, arguing that the “overwhelming majority” of cops did not support the ban. Nevertheless, the coalition of sheriffs, chiefs, and officers’ organizations held together.

Biaggi’s bullet ban passed 400–21 in the House in December 1985. Immediately after the vote, Biaggi addressed the police associations. “If not for the substantial and very visible support from the law enforcement community,” he confirmed, “there would be no victory to celebrate.” The passage of the ban in the House demonstrated “in a very convincing way just how formidable a political force the law enforcement community can be when speaking with one forceful voice.” The Fraternal Order of Police’s president personally commended Biaggi for getting the bill through the House. “You put your personal and legislative career on the line to back law enforcement throughout this country. We will never forget you!”

It was now up to individual police officers to finish the fight in the Senate. It was not easy. The gun lobby had the advantage in both experience and money: they had donated $1.4 million to members of Congress running for reelection in 1984. One congressman anonymously observed that the gun lobby was simply better at working the Hill: “The average deputy sheriff doesn’t know a lot about how the House works.” Though the president of the Police Foundation had groused that members of Congress were more afraid of the National Rifle Association than of police, the police pressure campaign overcame conservative resistance.

In the end, the final, reconciled version of the bullet ban contained Biaggi’s preferences, preserving the prohibition on sales of existing stocks of armor-piercing bullets. Reagan signed Biaggi’s bill, though the Congressman was not invited to a signing ceremony.

Biaggi’s work was the turning point in the consolidation of police political power on the national stage. It set the foundation for the 1994 crime bill, the brainchild of another tough-on-crime northern Democrat, Joe Biden, which would fund the hiring of 100,000 new cops. Blue Power had finally arrived in Washington, thanks to a cop-turned-Congressman—and cop-killer bullets.

Blue Power made police bulletproof.

---

If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.