Bratton Stands Up For The Good Guys

Throughout the debate about policing, I've been really torn. That has only been worse with the events in New York. I literally never had a negative feeling about the NYPD before, and with good reason. They are the best and bravest of the city. They do the tough job every day. They do it well too.

NYPD Chief Bratton pretty much summed up many of my thoughts in his speech at the memorial of officer Wenjian Liu:

Speaking shortly after Mayor Bill de Blasio at the Brooklyn funeral home that hosted Liu’s burial service, Mr. Bratton seemed to strike back at accusations of racism and overbearing policing from protesters enraged at the killing of black Staten Islander Eric Garner at the hands of NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo. Mr. Bratton recalled Liu’s life story, as an immigrant who came from China at age 12 and resolved to join the force after the 9/11 attacks.

“For 170 years, immigrants in this city have found a home in the NYPD,” Mr. Bratton said, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Only the homelands have changed over time. First it was the Irish, then it was the Italians.”

“And now our cops come from everywhere. The NYPD looks a lot more like the city it serves than some people think,” he continued.

Mr. Bratton went on to challenge accusations that the police department is an authoritarian force, arguing instead that law enforcement allows for the possibility of open expression.

“Everyone who comes here is from someplace where opportunity is more rare. Someplace where fear is more common. Someplace less free,” he said. “And if you come from such a place, is it any wonder you’d want to join the profession that helps make America so different? Because without public safety there is no possibility of free government. Everything that our government promises—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear—everything starts with public safety. It starts with us.”

Bratton went on to ask why "we always lose the good ones," before answering that it is the law of averages- almost all the cops are good.

There are certain conflicting realities in the debate over policing. On the one hand, African-American men are simply policed differently by an exponential percentage, and that isn't acceptable. On the other hand, 99% of cops are good people doing an essential job. Both are true. The difference may be one in one-hundred cops, or simply a matter of broad policy oversights that cause real problems. It's not an issue of 25% of the cops or some other absurd number being bad. In the rush to paint broad, full strokes over our cops and public safety workers, the debate has gotten away from us.

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Not Many Ways Down From NYPD-Mayor Feud

Mayor Bill de Blasio was elected in a landslide victory in 2013 that was both necessary and illustrated the reality of the New York City Metropolitan's electorate. First, it illustrated how New York has changed, as de Blasio won a rout while every county around New York City elected Republicans. Second, it was necessary to turn the tide in New York City, where a liberal town had elected some fairly conservative, racially tinged policies for a long time. While the suburbs had very white, older, more conservative electorates coming out in 2013, New York City had a very liberal, much younger, much more diverse coalition send the Mayor to office in a crushing defeat of a former Giuliani ally.

It's important to understand this- Bill de Blasio was elected to turn back the tide of the Giuliani and Bloomberg years. Both of those mayors, elected with a much whiter coalition, had placed an increased emphasis on law enforcement mayorships, at the expense of other priorities, such as public education, transportation, and raising wages. This Mayor was supposed to change that. He was going to put an emphasis on early childhood education, raising the minimum wage, and making the city easier to navigate for the working poor. Beyond that though, he was going to end "stop and frisk," and some of the other more racially charged law enforcement policies of the last generation. New York had essentially "moved" much of it's crime out of the wealthier and more "tourist" destination parts of the city, and then cracked down hard with policing in heavily poor, heavily minority neighborhoods. It's important to view the NYPD in "3-D," because they did a lot more than arrest people of color over the last 20 years to lower the crime rate, however, the tensions of Giuliani and Bloomberg era policing programs was a major issue to de Blasio's electorate, and the changes he was going to bring were important to him.

They were also not overly popular with the NYPD itself. In the eyes of the rank-and-file cop, the force has done a pretty damn good job, and the proof is in the results. Changing protocols is rarely popular with any job, and it's certainly not popular with cops. Add to that the inescapable (to this point) racial tensions that go along with the job, a first-year contract negotiation between the city and the PBA union, a union leadership election forthcoming, and a highly controversial alleged police brutality case, in a time when these cases are prominent, and you have this- a tinder box.

The Mayor has not helped himself. He probably should have laid a little lower on the Garner case early on, and he almost certainly should have been more careful in his rhetoric. With that said, even if he had done that, his mere policy changes and the contract negotiation alone probably would have caused some bad tensions. Add to those the absolute grandstanding of the PBA President in the city, and some of his current allies (I don't want to characterize Giuliani or Governor Pataki as real allies, as they've done more than their share of screwing to cops before), and you have the fight we have now. You have cops turning their back on the Mayor while he spoke at the funeral of an officer who was shot by a crazed lunatic. At this point, the Mayor's office can't back down on policy or the contract, as there would be no benefit, and there's no give on the part of the union either.

In short, I don't seeing this fight subsiding any time soon, nor do I think it was totally avoidable to begin with. There's not much benefit in either side backing down. So now we're going to watch a liberal Democratic Mayor and a group of public employees have a drawn out political fight, one that isn't beneficial to either side.

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