One reason that Bill de Blasio has moved from so-called broken windows or quality of life policing to sloganeering about neighborhood policing and a de facto policy of not-so-benign neglect is that providing real support to people before there’s a call or need for police intervention is arduous and expensive, while talk is still cheap.
Another reason is that he doesn’t have control of his own police department, whose members haven’t been shy about rubbing his nose in that fact even as they’ve become increasingly shy about doing the job asked of them and shootings in recent months have more than doubled from the same stretch just a year earlier. You don’t like what we do? Duck!
If there’s an embodiment of policing as a protection racket in New York City, it’s Ed Mullins, the vulgar, Trumpist head of the sergeants union who’s been at war with the mayor since 2014.
This May, Mullins called the city’s health commissioner, Oxiris Barbot, a “bitch”— and the mayor made her apologize to the police. That was after someone leaked an exchange weeks earlier in which the NYPD’s Chief of Department, Terence Monahan, tried to commandeer Health Department N95 masks when medical workers on the front lines of the fight against the virus were desperately short on them and she told him “I don’t give two rats’ asses about your cops.”
Monahan has heard and said worse, and the NYPD got 250,000 masks, but that didn’t stop Mullins from declaring that “Truth is this bitch has blood on her hands but why should anyone be surprised the NYPD has suffered under DeBlasio since he became Mayor.” (Barbot resigned in August, joining the list of women of color de Blasio has thrown under the bus.)
The grim punchline is that the city is full of cops — who have been charged by the mayor and governor at different points with enforcing mask-wearing compliance — not wearing masks, with the NYPD’s own Twitter account routinely sharing photos of groups of unmasked officers.
De Blasio says “the reality is it’s a very clear standard. We need to protect each other and everyone’s expected to do it.” If only that was New York City’s reality. But in fact, the NYPD has long been deeply suspicious of civilian oversight, let alone leadership.
Just try to imagine teachers or any other group of government workers simply ignoring the rules this way. For the NYPD, which has barricaded most of the 22 blocks with precincts in Manhattan for months now while brushing off questions from elected officials about that “siege mentality,” it’s routine. (De Blasio has routinely dodged questions about this, too.)
A few weeks after attacking Barbot, Mullins posted the police report of the mayor’s daughter after she was arrested at a protest, and without even removing her personal information from it. De Blasio called that doxxing “unconscionable,” but did nothing.