http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/lupica-blaz-improve-relationship-nypd-article-1.2052929The intersection of Tompkins and Myrtle Aves. in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, where two policemen of this city were murdered in cold blood and in broad daylight on Saturday afternoon, now becomes a crossroads for the mayor and for the city itself. You cannot properly govern the city as mayor if the police force does not believe it has your support. And this police force clearly believes it does not.
There is one big job for Bill de Blasio going forward, and it is not his cockeyed crusade against carriage horses, not acting as the self-appointed leader of a progressive movement that largely exists inside his own head, and his own ambition.
The job for de Blasio — and all those around him acting as if they know everything about everything after less than a year at City Hall — is to repair his relationship with the rank and file of the NYPD, starting with the ones who turned their backs on him at Woodhull Hospital on Saturday after Officer Rafael Ramos and Officer Wenjian Liu were pronounced dead.
At Woodhull on Saturday, de Blasio tried to change the subject about the recent tensions between him and the NYPD by saying it was not a time for “politics and political analysis.” On the same day, de Blasio’s press secretary, Phil Walzak, when asked about a torrent of angry words from Patrick Lynch of the cops’ union and also about the turned backs, said it was “unfortunate that in a time of great tragedy some would resort to irresponsible, overheated rhetoric that angers and divides people.”
In that moment, one in which he should have had the grace and good sense to say nothing, Walzak not only sounded like a tone-deaf political hack, he sounded like somebody who had developed amnesia about the irresponsible and overheated rhetoric, the angry and divisive anti-cop sentiment, that have been running rampant in this city for weeks.
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Cops investigate the shooting of two police officers in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn on Saturday.
The makeshift memorial is pictured where two police officers were shot dead in the Brooklyn on Saturday.
City Councilman Rafael Espinal speaks outside the Ramos family's home on Sunday.
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The makeshift memorial is pictured where two police officers were shot in the head in the Brooklyn borough of New York, December 21, 2014. The NYPD officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were shot and killed as they sat in a marked squad car in Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon, New York Police Commissioner William Bratton said. The suspect in the shooting then shot and killed himself, Bratton said at a news conference at the Brooklyn hospital where the two officers were taken. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri (UNITED STATES - Tags: SOCIETY CIVIL UNREST CRIME LAW).
NYC Councilman Rafael Espinal speaks outside the Ramos family's home, Sunday, December 21, 2014, Brooklyn, NY. (Jeff Bachner/for New York Daily News).
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James Keivom/New York Daily News
Where were Walzak and his boss while all that was going on? Sometimes these people sound as if they are still running for office instead of running the city.
No one is suggesting, as Lynch has, at the top of his voice, that somehow the mayor had anything to do with the madman who came from Maryland and from the worst precincts of hell to shoot two New York City policemen.
Still: If this mayor does not speak up against the kind of rhetoric that has been directed at the NYPD since the grand jury on Staten Island decided not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, then he is suborning such rhetoric, and the great and dangerous lie behind it: That the people of the city need protecting from those sworn to protect them.
This is what happens when this mayor acts more interested — or deferential — about what a self-promoter like Al Sharpton thinks about policing than those actually doing it in New York City.
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Mourners attend candlelight vigil for slain NYPD officers
The police officers of this city weren’t always happy with Rudy Giuliani when Giuliani was mayor, starting with how he thought they should be paid. But they knew where they stood with Giuliani the way they knew where they stood with Mike Bloomberg. But then neither one of them ever gave you the idea, when they were running for office, that they were running against cops the way de Blasio did.
The mayor has to understand that if he does not step up and step forward now and admit mistakes he has made with the NYPD because of his obsession with playing to his base, then the image of those cops turning their backs on him will be a part of his permanent record.
But the mayor’s chief flack thinking anybody actually cared what he thought about the kind of anger and mourning we saw at Woodhull Hospital makes you wonder if these people at City Hall have the capacity to admit any kind of mistake, or if they have the capacity to change.
We know that de Blasio has told his son, Dante, to be careful in any dealings with the police, because de Blasio wanted everybody to know that. We know Sharpton somehow was given the right to give lectures about how cops are supposed to do their jobs with Bill Bratton in the room. We know how quickly de Blasio spiked the ball when he got some good low numbers on crime and homicides.
But if two cops sitting in a patrol car in the middle of the afternoon on the Saturday before Christmas aren’t safe, how safe is de Blasio’s New York?
The mayor and his wife and Bratton were at St. Patrick’s on Sunday morning, listening as Timothy Cardinal Dolan spoke of “fear and fracture” in the city. Now there is only one fracture for the mayor to worry about, the one he has created between City Hall and 1 Police Plaza.
Those cops turned their backs on de Blasio Saturday night because he did it to them first.
