So it’s come to this: On the weekend New York City buries another of its Finest, Detective Wenjian Liu, the focus is on the mayor — and whether police officers will again turn their backs on him.
NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton calls the gesture “inappropriate.” Peter King, the Republican congressman from Long Island, doesn’t like it either, but because it is “creating sympathy” for the mayor.
Even before the back-turnings, Cardinal Timothy Dolan was saying it’s “unfair and counterproductive to dismiss our mayor and other leaders as enemies of the police.”
Let’s stipulate up front that the man responsible for the murders of Officers Liu and Rafael Ramos is not the mayor but the nut who pulled the trigger. Let’s stipulate too that the mayor does not have blood on his hands.
Let’s do so, however, while acknowledging that the murders have illuminated the squalid assumptions behind so much of Bill de Blasio’s rhetoric about police.
Long before Officers Liu and Ramos were gunned down on that Brooklyn street corner, de Blasio had run his campaign for mayor based on calumny: that the NYPD is a racist police force.
This was what de Blasio meant when he campaigned against “an abusive stop-and-frisk policy that targeted communities of color.” In other words, we weren’t talking about a few bad apples. We were talking about an entire force out to get people of color.
And just look at the characters who were attracted by the argument.
Start with Kicy Motley. Back when de Blasio was but one Democratic candidate among many (and not even the leading one) vying for the nomination, Motley was working on the de Blasio campaign. She came to the campaign with definite views on the cops.
A year earlier, she’d tweeted “F - - k. The. Police” after New York cops shot and killed a knife-wielding man in Times Square.
Later she had tweeted “there’s a part of me rooting for #Dorner,” a reference to former LAPD cop Chris Dorner, who killed three police officers and the daughter of a police officer in a shooting spree that ended when he took his own life.
Today Motley proudly works for Mayor de Blasio in “community affairs” in Brooklyn.
Shortly after Motley’s tweets became public, another member of Team de Blasio was found to have made similar posts.
In addition to rants against Jews and vulgar references to then-Speaker Christine Quinn’s anatomy, Anthony “Tony” Baker — who worked for then-Public Advocate de Blasio — had posted this gem: “Kill the Police.”
Baker resigned, and de Blasio went on to be elected mayor. For a while, all was quiet.
Then came the infamous July meeting at City Hall, where the mayor seated the loudest voice in the anti-cop chorus, the Rev. Al Sharpton, on one side of him and Commissioner Bratton on the other, suggesting they were equal in authority in his administration.
Naturally the Rev. Sharpton used his position to berate his host and suggest that instead of retraining his cops, the mayor should “perp-walk one of them.”
Two months later, New Yorkers learned that one of the mayor’s top advisers, Rachel Noerdlinger, was living with a man who is also no fan of police. His name is Hassaun McFarlan, and he has a long criminal record that includes homicide, conspiring to run a cocaine operation and nearly running a New Jersey cop off the road.
In his Facebook posts, McFarlan calls police officers “pigs.”
Ultimately Noerdlinger stepped down, after de Blasio’s initial effort to defend her.
Then came the grand jury’s decision in the Eric Garner case. A day after the Staten Island jurors concluded there wasn’t probable cause to indict a police officer for his death, Mayor de Blasio spoke publicly about how he and his wife, who is black, had raised their son, Dante, to fear police.
He also suggested New York’s police needed to be retrained out of their racism. “The way we go about policing has to change. People need to know that black lives and brown lives matter as much as white lives.”
No calls for civility then from other city leaders. Nor did we hear admonitions that the mayor had gone too far in rhetoric that indicted an entire police force.
More recently, when police were attacked by a group of “peaceful” protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, the mayor couldn’t even bring himself to acknowledge the cops had been assaulted. Instead he said they were “allegedly” assaulted.
This was followed by his reappointment of a judge who freed without bail a Brooklyn gang-banger who’d posted threats against the NYPD after the Liu and Ramos murders.
So we are left with this. Two fine police officers are dead — and the mayor wonders where people ever got the idea he doesn’t like cops.
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De Blasio reappoints judge who freed men who threatened cops
