“Seeking to end more than two weeks of a precipitous drop in police activity, Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said on Friday that he had instructed top commanders to do what they could to reverse the trend,” the New York Times reports.
New York City Police in a Work Slowdown
The New York Post says New York City police have launched a “virtual work stoppage.”
Matt Taibbi: “My first response to this news was confusion. I get why the police are protesting – they’re pissed at Mayor de Blasio, and more on that in a minute – but this sort of ‘protest’ pulls this story out of the standard left-right culture war script it had been following and into surreal territory.”
“I don’t know any police officer anywhere who would refuse to arrest a truly dangerous criminal as part of a PBA-led political gambit. So the essence of this protest seems now to be about trying to hit de Blasio where it hurts, i.e. in the budget, without actually endangering the public. So this police protest, unwittingly, is leading to the exposure of the very policies that anger so many different constituencies about modern law-enforcement tactics.”
Quote of the Day
“The mayor is not in any way to be treated with people turning their backs. It doesn’t matter whether you like the mayor or you don’t like the mayor, you have to respect the mayor’s position.”
— Rudy Giuliani, quoted by Newsday, after New York City police turned their backs to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) speaking at a police officer’s funeral.
De Blasio Loses the Police
“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,” Politico reports.
“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 last few days.”
“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.”
Giuliani Says Obama Encouraged Police Hate
In the wake of two New York City police officers being assassinated, Rudy Giuliani said that President Obama has engaged in “propaganda” encouraging people to “hate the police,” The Hill reports.
Said Giuliani: “We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police. The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence, a lot of them lead to violence, all of them lead to a conclusion: The police are bad, the police are racist. That is completely wrong.”
De Blasio Warned His Son About Police
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said he had to warn his black son about the police, Gawker reports.
Said De Blasio: “Because Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers that he may face. A good young man, law-abiding young man who would never think to do anything wrong. And yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face, we’ve had to literally train him—as families have all over this city for decades—in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.”
