feature: the ny police union wages “vile” war against mayor bill de blasio

Following the killing of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, an evident divide continues to grow between the New York Police Union and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio – with Pat Lynch, head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, declaring that de Blasio now has blood on his hands. The NYPD has literally turned their back on the mayor, hundreds of officers turning their backs on a screen showing the mayor (as he spoke) at the funeral of Rafael Ramos. This war is regarded as a direct response to comments made by the mayor after the non indictment in the Eric Garner case, in which he admitted that he had previously spoken to his Black son about the dangers he may face dealing with police (below). Was he wrong to warn his son? Check out this article from The Daily Beast (click here) which explores just that, excerpts below. 

By Alexander Aplerku, AFROPUNK Contributor

This is profoundly personal for me. I was at the White House the other day, and the president of the United States turned to me, and he met Dante a few months ago, and he said that Dante reminded him of what he looked like as a teenager. And he said, I know you see this crisis through a very personal lens. I said to him I did. Because Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years, about the dangers he may face. A good young man, a 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.

We hear every prominent black man in America who has a son and who decides to talk about this publicly—football players and actors and others—say exactly the same thing. We’ve heard it hundreds of times. Are these men lying? Are they paranoid weirdos? Of course they aren’t. They are fathers, describing to the rest of us what I thought was a widely acknowledged reality. Is it somehow jarring to some people that the father who spoke these words is not black but white? I bet that has something to do with it. Do we accept black fathers saying this, because we grant them the presumption of speaking from experience, which we don’t grant the white de Blasio? This may be how human brains, or some of them, are wired. But it makes no sense.

Certainly, this response would be understandable and even justified if de Blasio had in fact attacked the police. But he did no such thing. He said he’s trained his son to “take special care” in dealing with the police—who, he added, “are there to protect him.” Where Pat Lynch and Rudy Giuliani heard a slur, millions of his constituents—black, brown, and even a few white like him—heard him representing, in terms that were, from their point of view, sadly their reality.

Not long ago, ProPublica, the website that does hard-nosed, empirical investigative journalism, undertook an extensive study of federally collected crime data on 12,000 police homicides over 22 years. The site found that young black males are far more likely to be shot by cops than young white males. Four times more likely, or eight times, or 10 times? Try 21 times more likely—31 per million as opposed to 1.5 per million for whites. This isn’t some liberal conspiracy. These are the numbers as reported to the government by police departments themselves.