Benevolent Despots

Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray arriving for the service. How the rank and file really feel when the PBA bosses aren't choreographing them. Photo by Mike Segar/Reuters in the Daily News.

I didn't fully get the picture that the cops turning their backs on Mayor de Blasio as he gave a eulogy for murdered officer Rafael Ramos yesterday were outdoors performing for the cameras, out of the mayor's sight, while inside the church things were different, as they should be:

The reaction from officers watching Officer Rafael Ramos' funeral on giant TV screens followed comments from police union officials who had said Mayor Bill de Blasio contributed to a climate of mistrust that contributed to the killings of the two New York Police Department officers.

Inside Christ Tabernacle Church in Queens, however, mourners gave de Blasio polite applause before and after his speech.

The mayor said hearts citywide were aching after the Dec. 20 shootings that left Ramos and his partner, Wenjian Liu, dead.

"All of this city is grieving and grieving for so many reasons," de Blasio said. "But the most personal is that we've lost such a good man, and the family is in such pain." (Yahoo, via Zandar)

That's because most cops really are pretty decent people, left to their instincts. They join the blue wall of silence on police brutality because of peer pressure, because they're human, with human weaknesses; and they participate in the antics of Patrick Lynch and Ed Mullins because they're intimidated, but it's not who they really are.

It really is who Lynch and Mullins are, though. As you can read from Ben Mathis-Lilley at Slate, the PBA leaderships treat all mayors more or less the same—even America's Fascist Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was threatened with being barred from attending police funerals as the PBAs fought him over salary and benefits contracts (February 1997, after some 23 months with no contract; they reached the contract deal that November). It's just uglier now (after 54 months with no contract, since June 2010) with de Blasio—where their racism is directly on view because of the mayor's deep connection with the black community; it was uglier still when David Dinkins was mayor (during Ray Kelly's first term as police commissioner, when he was the best commish since Theodore Roosevelt instead of one of the worst, as he became years later under Bloomberg).

I don't believe Lynch and Mullins are sad at all about the murders of Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu—they can't conceal their excitement at the opportunity it gives them to tell more lies about the mayor and his alleged disrespect for the NYPD. The police had barely started investigating the crime scene when Mullins was out there anonymously (but you could tell it was him) spreading fantastical rumors about the killer's supposed connection to an anti-police gang and fraudulent hints of a connection between that and de Blasio. There's just nothing so terrifying they wouldn't leap to exploit it, including, of course, 9/11 (but Giuliani was as much of a master of that technique as they were).

Minority cops (of whom there are happily more at this time than ever since the days when the Irish counted as non-white) are starting to speak out—out of uniform, they're as nervous around white cops as their teenage sons are of being profiled and treated with unpredictable violence. I hope the many white cops who would never act in such a way will start speaking out too.

In the meantime, I ran across some startling research while putting this post together, by Andrea Cann Chandrasekher of the University of California at Davis Law School (August 2013), who found some very robust correlations between New York City police misconduct of various kinds and the amount of time they spent without a contract over the years from 1996 to 2008:

As they wait for the PBAs and the mayor to come up with a deal, it seems, they get more and more insecure financially and psychologically and more and more frustrated in general, and this increases the likelihood that some cops will use excessive force (physical force, pointing guns, using pepper spray, using nightstick or radio or flashlight or gun as a club, chokehold) or abuse authority (frisking, stopping, refusing to provide name and shield, threatening arrest or force, demanding unwarranted search of car or home, etc.), especially at the patrolman rank.

In this way, if you want to talk about people with blood on their hands, those who have been unable to make a bargain since 2010, over most of Bloomberg's third term and the first year of de Blasio's, are in part responsible for whatever police brutality and abuse we see in the city right now, which may or may not include the deaths of Eric Garner and Akai Gurley depending on your point of view (it certainly does for me)—de Blasio and Bratton have put an end to the stopping and frisking, but until then police misconduct claims in New York reached record highs, rising 150% from 2006 to 2012 (most of that after the contract lapsed in 2010, just as Chandrasekher's findings would suggest) and costing the city something like $45 million a year in payouts to victims.

And it isn't de Blasio's team that's refusing to negotiate seriously, either—they've managed to make deals with everybody else the Bloomberg administration couldn't, all of the city's unions except the uniformed services. It's the not-so-benevolent associations that are to blame, and their dishonest, viperish leaders.

Ex-Sergeant Sean Glans (it must be tough being named after a penis) of the Saratoga County Sheriff's Department upstate near Schenectady resigned after this video went viral in November. Of course he was mistreating white guys, so he didn't have a chance.

That's a PBA that's been having a really rough year: in February,

Deputy Charles E. Fuller, 46, of Corinth, who is president of the Saratoga County Deputy Sheriff's Police Benevolent Association, was charged with attempting to aid the possession and distribution of more than 500 grams of cocaine in a federal complaint unsealed Friday in U.S. District Court. Fuller appeared before a U.S. magistrate judge on Friday afternoon and is being held in federal custody pending a detention hearing on Monday.