The hostility toward New York Mayor Bill de Blasio that led police officers to stop enforcing laws on minor crimes and traffic violations will continue even after arrests and summonses start to climb, union leaders said.
Although labor leaders denied that police had stopped working, criminal summonses fell to 347 for the week ending Jan. 4, compared with 4,077 in the same week last year. In Manhattan, police and traffic agents issued just 104 parking tickets. In the same period a year ago, they handed out more than 4,200.
What Police Commissioner Bill Bratton described as “a pretty widespread stoppage” appeared to be ending after more than two weeks, he said Jan. 9. Statistics for the week ending today are due today.
Bridging the divide between a mayor elected after pledging to reduce police abuse in minority communities and officers chafing under more intense oversight of their actions on the street will be difficult, say supporters of both the mayor and the disaffected rank-and-file.
At stake, aside from the mayor’s agenda, is department discipline in a city of 8.4 million people where felonies last year fell to an all-time low. It’s also a city that had to pay out a record $212 million in police-abuse law claims in fiscal 2014.
‘Anti-Cop’
Job actions by any city employee would violate state law and subject union leaders to potential fines and contempt-of- court citations. That won’t happen if the insubordination ends, Bratton said.
Although de Blasio has heaped praise on the department for keeping crime low, union leaders say they lack his support. There’s no consensus on how the rancor might let up.
“I do believe the mayor is anti-cop,” said Ed Mullins, president of the 1,200-member Sergeants Benevolent Association. He backed up Patrick Lynch, president of the 25,000-member Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, who after two officers were killed in an ambush last month said, “blood on the hands starts at City Hall in the office of the mayor.”
To Eric Adams, a former police captain who’s now borough president in Brooklyn, the antagonism will end as the trend toward more diversity among its ranks reduces the percentage of white officers who live outside the city. In 2014, whites made up 51.5 percent of the force; in 2004, they represented almost 60 percent, according to police personnel statistics.
“We had police practices in this city for 20 years with stop-and-frisk, marijuana arrests, drunkenness that aggressively targeted people of color,” said Adams, 54, who is black and graduated from the Police Academy in 1984 as its highest-ranked student. “Now we have a mayor who says that’s not OK, and this creates a level of discomfort among some officers.”
Representing Brooklyn
Adams represents the city’s most-populous borough, where on Dec. 20 the officers were shot to death in their squad car. The execution-style killing by a drifter with a history of mental illness came after weeks of demonstrations over the July death of Eric Garner, 43, an unarmed Staten Island man, and the subsequent grand jury decision not to indict the officer who killed him during an apparent chokehold.
De Blasio, 53, who is white and married to a black woman, worsened the relationship by saying he’d counseled his own son to beware of police. Mullins and Lynch object to his association with the Reverend Al Sharpton, the civil-rights activist and renowned police critic. When Sharpton appeared alongside the Democratic mayor and Bratton at a City Hall roundtable last year, police officers were incensed.
Tolerance Cited
Union leaders said de Blasio created an anti-police environment that led to the shooting. They cited his tolerance for anti-police violence demonstrations that clogged major city roads, and his characterization of the Garner incident and its aftermath as evidence of historic U.S. racism. At the funerals of Officer Wenjian Liu, 32, and Officer Rafael Ramos, 40, hundreds of officers turned their back on de Blasio when he spoke.
“We had weeks and weeks of protest and lawlessness in which city roads were blocked and demonstrators hurled insult after insult at us, and we saw the mayor condoning violations of law,” Mullins said. “It needs to end with him saying he misspoke. He should clarify his remarks, and he’s never done that.”
‘Moving Forward’
That’s not going to happen, said de Blasio, who has supported increasing outside scrutiny of the department by a federal-court-appointed monitor, a newly created city inspector general and a beefed-up Civilian Complaint Review Board. He’s pledged to outfit patrol officers with body cameras to record street interactions with civilians.
“I just don’t want to do that, I think this is about moving forward,” de Blasio said during a Jan. 7 news briefing, when asked why he won’t apologize. “I don’t think it’s about what people said, I think it’s about moving forward and getting things done together.”
The mayor ran for office on a vow to improve police relations with minority communities, which implied the department hadn’t been doing a good job at that, said Richard Aborn, president of the nonprofit Citizens Crime Commission, which works to reduce crime and improve the city’s criminal justice system.
This is a municipal union dispute that’s not about traditional concerns such as wages, hours, pensions and working conditions, Aborn said.
Acting Out
“It’s about a perception of abandonment, and cops are acting out in the one way they know how,” Aborn said. “These cops were under verbal assault from demonstrators for months; then you have this shooting.”
It doesn’t matter that de Blasio accurately described harm created by overuse of stop-and-frisk and other aggressive actions on the street, Aborn said. It doesn’t matter that the mayor was proved correct when crime fell even after the tactics were reduced 75 percent.
“They overlook that this mayor delivered millions of dollars in overtime pay, technology and training to make them more productive and safer,” Aborn said. “In Bratton, he brought in a police commissioner second to none, and he’s repeatedly praised the department for its performance in reducing crime.”
Future slowdowns are unlikely, particularly if crime increases, just as a matter of personal and professional pride, Aborn said. Even while some officers held back, two police officers in the Bronx were shot Jan. 5 responding to an armed robbery after their shift had ended.
“Police officers know if they stay off the streets too long, crime will come back, and if that happens their own personal safety is at risk, not just the city’s,” Aborn said.
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