Mayor de Blasio Skips Slain Officer's Memorial, Further Undermines Cops

In May of 1991, I proudly graduated from the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and immediately headed to my first duty assignment as a Special Agent in the New York City Office.

Looking back, at the exact moment that I was collecting my FBI badge, credentials and duty sidearm, and pointing my car north on I-95 towards the Big Apple, Bill de Blasio was serving as an aide to NYC Mayor David Dinkins, a man he had helped elect in 1989 while serving as a volunteer coordinator for the campaign.

The irony that David Dinkins, a decent enough guy, was a one-term mayor who is in the running for one of NYC’s worst mayors in history, is lost on no one.

In 1988, de Blasio established his early bona fides for entry into Leftist politics by traveling to Nicaragua and providing material support to the Sandinista National Liberation Front, the ruling socialist government that — shockingly — the Reagan administration opposed.

Well, at the end of 1990, as my 25-year FBI career was about to launch, and Bill de Blasio was serving in a junior position in City Hall, a staggering 2,245 people were murdered in New York City. And yet, in 2016, a year after I retired from the FBI’s New York City Office, and de Blasio was now the man in charge at that same City Hall, there were only 335 murders recorded. Please, let’s not attribute this remarkable turnaround from the carnage at the peak of the 1980’s "crack wars" to Bill de Blasio. Even though avowed socialists decry inherited wealth, he was most certainly a beneficiary of others’ work.

As I left law enforcement, where I had served for half of my life, and de Blasio was navigating the early stages of his mayoral tenure, one thing was evident: the homicide rate between 1990 and 2016 had been decreased by an almost incomprehensible 85 percent. Fact.

De Blasio, as has been well chronicled, ran in 2013 on what many considered to be an anti-cop platform that pilloried many of the successful law enforcement tactics introduced by Police Commissioner Bill Bratton in January of 1994, when he served his first tenure as P.C. in the Giuliani administration. The successful proactive policing methodologies were continued under a number of P.C.s, to include Ray Kelly, who served as NYC’s Top Cop under de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg.

Stop, Question, & Frisk, CompStat, and Broken Windows policing were all assailed by de Blasio as "racist" anachronisms of a bygone era. It mattered little to de Blasio, then and now, that some 95 percent of both victims and perpetrators in NYC’s annual homicide statistics are persons of color.

As they apparently serve no Leftist political goal, could it be that those lives mattered less?

Ahem …

Those means and methods of keeping big cities safe are toxic now. So you understand political flip-flopping.

We see you, Congressional Black Caucus, you who supported these methods and legislation to stiffen drug sentences to reduce the wanton inner-city violence … until you were against same.

Ahem (again) …

And who can forget de Blasio’s worrisome claim, following no grand jury indictment in the 2014 death of Eric Garner on Staten Island that he counseled his bi-racial son, Dante, about the "dangers" he may face from NYPD officers? This fear was enough to keep de Blasio up at night.

I certainly don’t condone the practice of turning ones back when rank and file law enforcement members choose to voice their displeasure over an elected official’s lack of support, as NYPD officers did to de Blasio following the assassination of two cops in December of 2014.

But I understand.

The false narrative that is police are hunting young black males to murder has fueled a number of recent similar assassinations of cops in Louisiana and Dallas. The politically-fueled rhetoric that inspires these miscreants to murder police officers is aided and abetted by politicians like Bill de Blasio and former President Obama, who came into office aided by his soaring rhetoric and promises to heal the divide in what would become a post-racial society, and instead left what was once a fissure, a giant yawning chasm in his wake.

Yes, like de Blasio, things Obama said were to blame. Yes, when he chose to speak out versus when he chose not to speak out were to blame. Yes, his seemingly begrudging and desultory support for law enforcement was to blame. And, yes, his continued promotion of the trope that America is rife with racist cops, prosecutors, judges, and jailers is to blame.

Now, I don’t blame these Leftist politicians for anyone’s murder. I blame the murderer, alone, for that. But Bill de Blasio and Barack Obama certainly don’t have clean hands when it comes to the diminution of the relationship between police and the communities of color they serve.

James A. Gagliano is a 1987 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Following his service as an Infantry Officer in the U.S. Army, he entered the FBI, serving in a myriad of positions in the investigative, tactical resolution (SWAT), undercover, diplomatic and executive management realms. He was a member of the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) and has posted to assignments in Afghanistan, Mexico City, and parts of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. He retired in December of 2015 from the FBI’s New York City Office. He currently serves as a Law Enforcement Analyst for CNN, provides Leadership consultation for corporate clients of the Thayer Leader Development Group (TLDG) at his alma mater, and instructs undergraduates at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, where he earned an M.P.S. in Homeland Security and Criminal Justice Leadership in 2016. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.