Monday, December 22, 2014

J'accuse, Ed Mullins

Montage from The Conservative Treehouse (Motto: "I want you to be Andrew Breitbart"), dated December 7.
Saturday afternoon, when many of my tweeps and I were watching in horror as the news of the killings of Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos dripped out of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Daily News came out, in one of the most circumstantiated early reports, with a weird detail, that the suspected killer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, might have been a member of a gang known as the "Black Gorilla Family" or "Black Guerilla Family" that had been threatening to avenge the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner by attacks on the New York police. It's vanished from the much-updated original story, but still extant at the moment in a followup from later that evening, from which the screenshots below are taken:


I was the first in my crowd to hear about this and reported it, gaining a response from an actual journalist (and not just any journalist, *humblebrag*):
I did find something, though: a moderately bizarre story from the Staten Island Advance, December 7, relating to the Guerillas and that note from a vintage mechanical typewriter reproduced in the News:
A letter bearing what appears to be the signature of Ed Mullins, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, has been circulating with a similar warning to the SBA's members, according to sources: "I have just received information of a credible threat to SHOOT an on duty police officer. It appears this is an organized action.... Please WEAR your VEST and carry your firearm off-duty along with additional magazines."

The warning comes amid days of protests following a Staten Island grand jury's decision Wednesday not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the July 17 death of Eric Garner in Tompkinsville.

According to sources, the letter continues, "As you know, the NYPD is going through a challenging time with no help from Mayor (Bill) De Blasio. Be assured this organization will do everything in its power and use every resource to protect you."
The warning found its way out from among the sergeants in the form of a tweet (H/t Steve M):
But that afternoon the Advance ran an update to the effect that the NYPD had determined that the threat was (a) not serious and (b) not aimed at New York police but Baltimore ones.


Notwithstanding which the Breitbart machine left the false information (see illustration at top) up on their site.

So Ed Mullins's circle of friends includes a crank with an elderly typewriter who doesn't know the difference between a guerilla and a gorilla, and a bunch of Breitbart fanbois, and he himself did his best to sow panic through the police force, on the basis of no evidence, as a way of denouncing Mayor de Blasio, three weeks ago. And it's pretty obvious to me that Mullins was also the News's anonymous source for the Saturday allegation that Brinsley was a member of the BGF (inspired by the fact that Brinsley was coming up from Baltimore, as if everybody in Baltimore were now under suspicion of gorillahood), incorporating this discredited and irrelevant story into his construction of a case that there is somehow a connection, through protesters against police brutality, between Brinsley and the mayor:
“Mayor de Blasio, the blood of these two officers is clearly on your hands,” Ed Mullins, president of the sergeants association, said in a statement to his union members Saturday night.
“It is your failed policies and actions that enabled this tragedy to occur,” he said. “I only hope and pray that more of these ambushes and executions do not happen again.”
By that night it was getting pretty clear that the shooter had no connection to the Gorillas or Guerillas, or indeed much of anybody else, but was increasingly just a lost, mentally ill and violent habitual criminal (if he really believed that #BlackLivesMatter, he should have started by not shooting his ex-girlfriend); but Mullins and Patrick Lynch of the PBA and ancient vampire Rudolf Giuliani and more were just getting started on the double falsehood that de Blasio had in some way favored anti-brutality protesters over police as if they were two sides in a contest and that the murder of the two officers in Bed-Stuy was in some way an inevitable outcome of the protests (not, of course, mentioning the unpunished murders in Ferguson, New York, and Cleveland which have given rise to the protests). And Mullins is back out urging officers to "wear your vest and carry your firearm off duty".

And so on—it went on for literally hours and never really yielded an insight.

I'm very sympathetic to the bothsiderist view in this particular case (predicated not on the idea that "they all do it" but that they all have some redeeming features) as represented by somebody like Eric Adams—beaten up by police in a station house as a black kid of 15, he became a cop himself and is now Brooklyn borough president—when he says everybody needs to calm down:
“Race relations will not erode in this city,” Adams said. “These two officers losing their lives in this way is going to compel us to come to the table… To seek to understand, and then be understood.”
It should be obvious that nobody deserves to be murdered, that every American has a right to protest against injustice, that we should value peace over retribution, and that above all we should never judge the group on the basis of the actions of the individual whether the group is defined by the color of its skin or the color of its uniform (by all accounts Ramos and Liu were really good cops, too). There isn't a contest of police vs. black folks but a community with a single interest, in good policing, to the benefit of all.

Mullins's dishonesty over the Black Guerilla Family turns out to be pretty trivial, and unnecessary to his plan. But you don't think this is the first time he's ever done something like that, do you? How many lies of the kind does it exemplify? How often does he do this? It's despicable manipulation, knowingly spreading false rumors to advance a political agenda, and lying, and it really has to be called out.

Then-Senator Eric Adams in the borough presidency campaign, March 2013, via AsianInNY.

Posted by at Labels: , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)