Report to the Commissioner
Patty Butler (Susan Blakely), an attractive young female police officer, is pretending to be a runaway girl with the nickname of "Chicklet." She has been given permission by the Department to be the live-in girlfriend of Thomas "Stick" Henderson (Tony King), a known drug dealer, so that they can gather evidence against him. To back up her cover story, Detective Bo Lockley (Michael Moriarty) has been given an almost impossible assignment: without being told she is actually an undercover officer, he is instructed to spend a few weeks trying to find this young runaway "Chicklet," who is believed to be somewhere in New York City. By Bo's actions of openly looking around and trying to find her, this will end up being reported back to Stick, which should convince him that his girlfriend really is a runaway.
Bo has no idea that his assignment is basically a fool's errand being used as a cover story. Amazingly enough, Bo is a determined and persistent detective and, despite what should have been a hopeless task, he tracks Chicklet to a disco club in the city. Chicklet is unaware of this effort by her superiors to solidify her cover; she is terrified that this cop is going to blow her cover. So she promises to meet him the next day if he just leaves. Bo is thanked by his supervisor, Lt. Seidensticker (Vic Tayback), and told to "forget about her" and go back to his previous assignment. Either infatuated with Chicklet or not able to just allow her to be another young girl abandoned by the system, when she fails to show the next day as she promised, he goes to Stick's loft to rescue her.
In the process, Bo and Stick become engaged in a firefight, with Chicklet caught in the crossfire. Stick is able to escape the apartment. Stick runs across town barefoot, carrying a handgun and dressed only in boxer shorts, pursued by Bo into a department store, where they are trapped in a Mexican standoff in one of the store's elevators. Eventually the police barricade the elevator, and Bo's partner Crunch (Yaphet Kotto) grabs Bo when he and Stick leave through the elevator's emergency exit ceiling panel. Bo having been pulled to safety, the police open fire on Stick, killing him.
In the aftermath of the firefight and the subsequent killing of Stick, it is discovered that Officer Butler has been killed in Stick's loft by Bo, and an investigation has to be made as to whether he was negligent. It's determined that she was killed as a result of Bo trying to defend himself from Stick shooting at him, and thus the shooting was accidental.
Bo, however, is so depressed by what he has done that he hangs himself in his jail cell before he finds out that it was an accident. The film is in effect, a report of an incident to the Police Commissioner, which explains the title.
neo noir