Question: almost every city where there's been police violence is under a Democratic Mayor...

[Celerity]

26. 2014: De Blasio's nightmare New York's mayor has lost the police -- and maybe much more than that.

https://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/bill-de-blasio-113755

Bill de Blasio, like his progressive political idol Barack Obama, is finding out that you can’t do the New Politics if you don’t pay attention to the old politics. In Obama’s case, it was a failure to recognize the threat posed to him by Republicans who didn’t buy into his calls for a post-partisan partnership with Congress. For New York’s ambitious liberal mayor, it was an inability to keep long-simmering tensions with the city’s traditionally powerful police department from boiling over in the past few days.

Just over a year after sailing into office with 72 percent of the vote on a message of transformational change, de Blasio found his mayoralty subsumed by a torrent of anger, unleashed by the murder of two police officers in Brooklyn Saturday by a troubled gunman who said he was killing “pigs” to avenge the deaths of two men by cops in Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri. By Monday, de Blasio was lashing out at the press corps that covers him, trying to paper over public divisions with his own police commissioner and coping with what friends described as the emotional blow of facing public rejection by many in the nation’s biggest police force. “He’s pretty badly shaken” by the murders, one told us.

That a civic tragedy would so quickly devolve into a full-blown political crisis for the new mayor was testament to the vehemence of anti-de Blasio elements in the police union — and the mayor’s mistaken belief that his 2013 victory gave him the right to shred an old Gotham political playbook that dictated a mayor show deference to the New York Police Department.

You can’t be big-city mayor and alienate the cops — and that’s just as true now as it was under three-term New York City Mayor Ed Koch, or even a century ago.

“Koch was loved by the cops and always told all his successors that you must have the support of the cops, that the cops can be your best friend. If Koch were alive today that’s what he would tell Bill de Blasio,” said George Arzt, former press secretary to Koch, whose election in 1977 election greatly improved City Hall-police relations. De Blasio “needs to press reset in his relationship with the cops,” Arzt said.

Good luck with that. The bad blood between the NYPD and de Blasio is nothing new — it dates back to an election campaign centered on de Blasio’s withering criticism of the Bloomberg administration’s stop-and-frisk policy, and his close alliance with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has organized scores of protests targeting cops over their behavior toward urban blacks.

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2016


De Blasio’s Police Reform Pledges May Burden His Re-election Bid

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/15/nyregion/de-blasios-police-reform-pledges-may-burden-his-re-election-bid.html

As Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York turns toward his re-election fight next year, an issue that galvanized his first run — achieving significant police reform — is suddenly becoming a liability. Caught in the gap between his soaring rhetoric as an outsider candidate and the realities of leading a city with a hair-trigger sensitivity to crime, Mr. de Blasio is disappointing many who once supported him, in a community he can ill afford to lose: the black voters who propelled him to office.

“All I know is, in all our circles, folks have conversations and there’s a buzz going around about the disappointment,” said Bertha Lewis, the former leader of Acorn who served on Mr. de Blasio’s transition team in 2014, but has become a vocal critic. “There’s a growing enthusiasm gap.” Throughout the mayor’s term, there have been opportunities for him to live up to his image and his promise as a would-be police reformer. Instead, those issues have become magnets for dissent.

Tens of thousands in extra pay for Daniel Pantaleo, the Staten Island officer who put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold in 2014. Disciplinary records newly shielded from disclosure. Resistance to police-reform legislation in the City Council. Continuing fidelity to a “broken-windows” model of policing.

Frustration can be heard at New York Communities for Change, a social justice advocacy group and early endorser of Mr. de Blasio in the 2013 Democratic primary, and from a former aide, Kirsten John Foy, whose handcuffing at a Brooklyn parade in 2011 helped galvanize Mr. de Blasio’s views on the need for changes in police practices. Last month, Mr. Foy stood alongside Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat and a possible challenger to Mr. de Blasio in 2017, at a protest outside Police Headquarters.

At the Council, a growing number of members have been refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of meetings, in part, they say, because of the administration’s handling of policing issues. Councilman Jumaane D. Williams, who was detained along with Mr. Foy in 2011, began the effort, saying his decision to offer the silent protest came after he learned that Officer Pantaleo accrued overtime pay while on modified duty. “That’s what brought me over the edge,” said Mr. Williams, a Democrat from Brooklyn. “I had to do something.”

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2017


Bill de Blasio’s Police Reform Agenda has Achieved Much and Disappointed Many

https://citylimits.org/2017/10/16/bill-de-blasios-police-reform-agenda-has-achieved-much-and-disappointed-many/

Bill de Blasio looked tired on a recent Tuesday morning as he sat wedged between NYPD brass within a police substation on the Lower East Side. His delivery was somber because he had to talk about the Las Vegas massacre, the never-ending threat of gun violence and the vast cowardice of federal lawmakers to do anything about it. But when it came to violence closer to home, the mayor had good news to share. “The facts that we’re going to give you about the month of September are outstanding. Crime continues to fall,” he said. Overall, crime was down 5 percent compared with last September. Murders were 40 percent lower. Shootings hit a record low. It was the kind of stat sheet that mayors dream of presenting a month ahead of a general election. “We are the safest big city in America,” de Blasio went on, “and I’m telling you now we will get safer.”

In fact, the data the mayor dished that day is only part of what his allies say is an overwhelmingly positive picture of law and order in de Blasio’s New York. Statistics that City Limits obtained from the state Division of Criminal Justice Services demonstrate that just as there is less crime in the city these days, there is less policing as well—in keeping with the mayor’s promise during the 2013 campaign to make law enforcement less intrusive.

From January through August of 2017, there were 500 fewer people busted for the lowest marijuana-possession offense than in the same period of 2016. Arrests for turnstile jumping were down by a 26 percent. Nearly 19 percent fewer people were nailed for criminal trespass and the number of busts for petit larceny was down more than 6 percent. And 2016 was already a low year for arrests: The number of misdemeanor arrests last year was one-fifth lower than it was in 2013 when Mike Bloomberg was mayor.

Both the crime stats and the arrest numbers are part of a peculiar dynamic as the mayor’s 2017 re-election campaign enters its final phase. De Blasio’s foes on the right habitually accuse him of presiding over a city descending into disorder, even as the crime statistics present strong evidence to the contrary. His critics on the left say he has fallen short of the ambitious police reform agenda he should have pursued, because even though the numbers of arrests and stops has plummeted, the NYPD still busts large numbers of people for minor crimes.

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