ike Sheehan may be known to you as Fox-5’s roving police correspondent, but 35 years ago he was a young police officer in Manhattan North, driving down Broadway at 96th Street with his partner Louie Wigand when he did a very strange thing. For no apparent reason he stopped the patrol car, switched off the engine (leaving the keys in the ignition), and he and Wigand just left their unattended police vehicle in the middle of a busy Manhattan street in the evening rush hour.

The 1971 police wildcat strike had begun.

While Sheehan and Wigand were showing their anger and independence, thousands of other police officers were doing the same thing all over the city. Word had come that a retroactive payment of $2,700 the city owed each of them according to a parity provision in their contract would be delayed — perhaps even denied — because of the city’s legal tactics. By day’s end, 85 percent of the city’s 27.400 patrolmen had either walked out or refused to go out on patrol — all despite the sincere pleas of PBA President Edward J. Kiernan for them to remain on the job.

Kiernan, apparently, had invested a lot of political capital in the success of the lawsuit to force payment of the retroactive pay and when it encountered this roadblock, he suffered a serious setback. Now his union had gotten away from him.

With Mayor Lindsay calling the walkout “dangerous” and New Yorkers staying home at night a little more than usual, detectives, sergeants and other superior officers worked 12-hour shifts with no days off, ultimately costing the city $2.5 million in overtime. Transit and housing cops — at that time in separate departments — went to work at first but by the wildcat’s fifth day began joining the walkout in increasing numbers.

At least 500 striking patrolmen showed up outside the State Supreme Court building at 60 Centre St. in Manhattan on that fifth day when a trial on the parity issue was scheduled to begin. “We want what’s ours,” they chanted. “What do we want? Parity. When do we want it? Now.”

In the courthouse, Kiernan was meeting behind closed doors with Judge Irving Saypol, who asked him to appeal to his members to return to work. Kiernan issued the appeal. The strikers ignored it. They weren’t going back, they said, unless they were assured of amnesty from the Taylor Law’s administrative and financial sanctions, most importantly the loss of two days’ pay for each day on strike.

Later in the day, when Kiernan saw which way the wind was blowing, he wired Lindsay saying “all bets are off” without an amnesty.

On Jan. 19, the sixth day of the walkout, a PBA delegates' meeting was held at 11 a.m. in the New Yorker Hotel at Eighth Avenue and 34th Street. The delegates voted 229-112 to go back to work.

That evening Mike Sheehan, Louie Wigand and thousands of others like them resumed the burden of policing early 1970s New York. The parity and amnesty issues remained unresolved.

Soon strike talk resumed after Lindsay issued a statement declaring that “mandatory” penalties would be invoked against officers who had participated in the walkout. Kiernan called the mayor’s remarks “ill-timed, ill-conceived and inflammatory” but he hadn’t suddenly developed a militant streak, urging the membership not to engage in a new walkout: “Hold the line,” he said. “Stay on the job.”

Then he uttered these famous last words: “There will be no docking of pay.”

New York City’s police officers eventually won the parity issue, collected their $2,700 and got a decent contract in the bargain. But despite Kiernan’s post-strike vow, they lost the amnesty argument and each striking officer lost about $500 for “violating the (Taylor) law.”

The following summer Kiernan stepped aside as PBA president and Bob McKiernan succeeded him.

The determination of the wildcatters in this 35-year-old episode resulted in a substantial net gain for individual PBA members. And the militancy expressed by those courageous police officers is what today’s PBA is striving for. It doesn’t mean that we have to walk off the job or violate any laws to get what we want in contract negotiations. But it does mean that we have to do whatever it takes to get justice for our members. And that’s what we, like the wildcat strikers of 1971, are trying to do.