Former New York Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy is being remembered as the embodiment of police reform after his death at age 91.

Murphy died of a heart attack yesterday at a hospital in Wilmington, NC, his son said.

Murphy was chief of police in Detroit, Washington and Syracuse, NY, as well as the nation’s largest city during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s.

In New York in 1972, he instituted rules restricting the use of deadly force to situations in which police needed to defend a life.