NYC Mayor Lashes Out at NYPD

If you ask law enforcement, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio may be the least popular politician in the country. Certainly, the mayor has attracted the ongoing ire of his city’s police department. This week, the NYPD turned their collective backs on de Blasio for the fourth time while attending the funeral for slain officer Wenjian Liu. On Monday, de Blasio made his first public comments regarding the gesture.

“Those individuals who took certain actions the last two weeks, they were disrespectful to the families involved,” de Blasio said at a press conference. “I can’t understand why anyone would do such a thing in the context like that.”

While I understand the argument that a funeral is a place for mourning and not political activism, for de Blasio to insist that he “can’t understand” the actions of the NYPD officers is to expose his own willful ignorance. Anyone who has followed this story from the beginning knows exactly why New York’s police officers are upset with the mayor. And, of course, so does he.

Though the public protests over the death of Eric Garner have begun to abate, the bad blood between the NYPD and the mayor is still very much a part of the climate. Officers insist that de Blasio is at least partially responsible for the cold murder of Officers Liu and his partner, Rafael Ramos. By giving the Black Lives Matter protestors undue respect, allowing the illegal protests to continue without impediment, and by declaring that he had to teach his own mixed-race son how to behave carefully around police, he gave legitimacy to the claims of the ignorant.

The Lies Become Truth

No one is truly responsible for the deaths of those officers other than the man who pulled the trigger. But the effect of those in politics and the media – almost all of whom see the cases of Eric Garner and Michael Brown through the most sinister lens imaginable – is undeniable. If news organizations had told the unvarnished truth about these incidents from the start, I can’t help but think those two officers would be alive today.

Never underestimate how desperately the disenfranchised will cling to a story that provides them with some excuse for their own failings in life. People with nothing going on have decided that the problem is not them but the racist system surrounding them. And they find support for that belief in every news report they turn on. They find support in the words of every liberal politician who wants to make a name for himself on the back of the movement. They won’t find support in the facts, but anti-establishment “social justice warriors” have never let that stop them.

Bill de Blasio is one cog in a much larger machine, but it appears he’s not willing to accept even that small amount of responsibility.