There’s an awful lot to dislike about Mayor Bill de Blasio as his eight years astride the city come to an end, following a Democratic primary in which three different members of his administration repudiated his leadership as they vied to replace him and none of the eight leading candidates wanted his endorsement other than Andrew Yang, who’s since left the party altogether.
De Blasio is a schemer and a dissembler, who came thisclose to getting indicted for his barely legal schemes and then, in what can only be called a Trump-like fashion, proclaimed that he’d been fully vindicated when prosecutors publicly scolded him for violating the spirit of the law while reluctantly announcing they wouldn’t bring criminal charges. (And, it’s worth noting, his “agents of city” argument meant to shield his conversations with outside advisors from public scrutiny is effectively the same one Trump flunky Steve Bannon is making now while refusing to testify before Congress).
Back to Bill, he’s someone who’s often seemed more interested in grand pronouncements than in the business of governing, who’s put slogans over substance and his wife in charge of a billion-dollar mental-health initiative that’s accomplished nothing measurable.
Someone who let public housing and the city’s jails continue to fall apart on his watch, while the homeless population continued growing. Who preferred railing against things he couldn’t control, like a state law for admissions to three elite public high schools, than doing the things he could, like improving the broader public school system and building a more equitable system for a wider array of “gifted” students.
He’s a pompous, prickly person who’s chronically late, and who frequently seemed miserable doing his job while spending much of his first term laying the groundwork for what proved to be an embarrassment of a presidential run and is spending his last few months laying the groundwork for what could be an equally embarrassing gubernatorial run.
Who went from talking about the police as a danger to people like his son to using the NYPD as a “concierge service” for his son, and who stood behind his commissioner after the police ran riot last summer at the same time that he was using (and has continued to use) the virus as an excuse to hide from the press, insisting on remote briefings as a matter of “public health.”
I could go on, and I have over the last seven years and change, about what’s wrong with this transcendentally, historically obnoxious guy, and how he’s governed New York. About how even when he does the right thing, for instance in no longer using the police to try and arrest away the street homeless, he manages to do it the wrong way by effectively leaving deeply disturbed and dysfunctional people to their own devices in a form of far from benign neglect.
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But we won’t have Bill de Blasio to kick around much longer, and his lengthy list of shortcomings has obscured for many New Yorkers (and, judging from the polls, most white New Yorkers) at least two big ways in which he’s lived up to the core promise he made as a mayoral candidate to leave behind a fairer, safer city.
He’s someone who had the vision to see a progressive wave rising in New York long before that was obvious, and the moxie to run for mayor as its avatar. He will depart as the first Democrat to hand City Hall over to another Democrat since Ed Koch gave way to de Blasio’s old boss David Dinkins in 1989.
And, as former News columnist Juan Gonzalez laid out in his book, “Reclaiming Gotham,” which places de Blasio and his first term in the context of a much larger grassroots progressive movement, he’s a mayor who can claim some real and often under-appreciated accomplishments in correcting the accumulated excesses of the preceding 20 years when Democrats had lost control of City Hall.
Start with universal pre-K, which has been a tremendous success and a gift to New Yorkers, saving families tens of thousands of dollars in childcare while getting more than a half million kids so far reading and socializing in a classroom environment that many of them would not otherwise have had. It’s made New York a more family friendly city, and helped many families stay here at a point in life when they might otherwise have decamped.
The very idea of UPK would have been basically inconceivable to candidates starting with the assumption that the mayor’s job is to manage the city’s existing resources and thus look for ways to cut and control spending, as had been the default since at least the city’s near bankruptcy in the 70s. But for a candidate whose appeal was based on a promise to fight inequality and give more resources to ordinary New Yorkers, it was almost necessary to have a signature proposal to pour new dollars into, in this case nearly a half-billion dollars a year.
And while candidate de Blasio talked at least as much about the millionaire’s tax he wanted Albany to implement to pay for the program as he did the program itself, he succeeded in getting the funds, though not the tax, from the state, and rolled out the program smoothly in a matter of months so that a huge, complex and arduous undertaking quickly became a good, useful and existing thing New Yorkers can simply take for granted.
To get a sense of how ambitious UPK is, consider that none of the eight Democrats vying to replace him offered anything on a remotely similar scale in a contest that often seemed to be more about moods than ideas.
On policing and police reform, too, de Blasio has rarely received his due, in no small part because of his long series of big symbolic missteps. But as lousy as de Blasio has been in talking about policing, he’s overseen a sustained period of real improvements and reforms.
While violent crime remains up here, as it is nationally, compared to where things were at the start of the pandemic, and there’s a widespread sense of growing urban disorder, New York remains an exceptionally safe big city, and the transformation of the NYPD on de Blasio’s watch has been remarkable.
As Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Ray Kelly were forced by the courts and the prevailing political winds to wind down their overuse of stop and frisk and Mayor de Blasio and Commissioner Bill Bratton continued that decline (and dropped the Bloomberg administration’s appeal of the judge’s ruling that the NYPD’s use of the tactic had been unconstitutional), it was a widely held opinion, including by this newspaper’s editorial page, that violent crime would inevitably surge. It did not.
Instead, violent crime continued to drop before the pandemic even as police stopped, frisked and arrested fewer and fewer people. By every conceivable measure, the number of bad interactions between the NYPD and civilians in the course of many millions of interactions a year continued to decline, to the point where it has raised real questions about whether or not the city still needs a Department as large as the present one.
The city got safer even as the jails continued to empty out, allowing for the deal in place now to finally close Rikers Island. The NYPD demonstrated it could maintain public safety without over-policing and over-incarcerating whole neighborhoods and populations. The idea, as CompStat creator Jack Maple would say, is “to catch the sharks, not the dolphins.”
And on de Blasio’s watch, that became more than rhetoric — demonstrating that many of the smaller “broken windows” issues that had long since been offloaded to the police as the problematic problem-solvers of last resort can, in fact, be handled by other agencies, and that it is possible to maintain public safety without dragnetting young Black and brown men.
“If eight years ago, I’d told you that the city was spending more on people who needed the help, many fewer people were getting arrested or stopped, cops almost never fired their guns, and that the city hadn’t fallen apart but was doing pretty damn well, I expect that’s a deal you would have taken,” said one administration veteran.
I certainly would have taken that deal, and it’s a foundation that Eric Adams, can build on.