Maybe he’s feeling guilty about that glitzy vacation, or maybe he overindulged on “la dolce vita.” Whatever the cause, Mayor Bill de Blasio came home full of hot air.
Less than an hour after two federal marshals and a city cop were wounded in a gunfight with a fugitive sexual predator, the mayor repeated many of his slanders of the NYPD. To say his timing was bad understates his boorish elitism toward the dangerous work of policing.
“For much of the previous 12 years, there was a growing tension and a growing disconnect between police and community all over our city,” de Blasio said, unprompted, at a Monday news conference. “This administration came into office with a commitment to ending the broken policy of stop-and-frisk, the overuse of stop-and-frisk, the unconstitutional use of stop-and-frisk. We settled the related lawsuit and we changed the practice on the ground, and the numbers speak for themselves.”
Which numbers would that be? That shootings are up by about 10 percent?
The tone-deafness is breathtaking when you consider that the mayor, joined by top cop Bill Bratton, began by referring to the fresh shootout in the West Village.
He said, “It appears that the injuries to the officers are not life-threatening, but we are waiting for more information.”
Imagine, for argument’s sake, that it was one of the heroic officers who died, instead of the perp, as the mayor was demonizing cops. His willingness to take that chance shows where his heart is. Hint: It’s not with those who risk their lives to keep us safe.
If it were, he would have gone to the hospital immediately to visit the wounded men, instead of after the press conference. Maybe the grim reality of the scene would have led him to deep-six his smears.
The choice of symbols reveals priorities, and de Blasio is still riding an anti-police agenda.
“The vision here is not of a separation between police and community. That’s what we had for 12 years,” he said as the officers were being treated. “We seek a unity between police and community.”
What community is he talking about? Thousands of black and Latino young men are alive today because they were not killed by their peers, thanks largely to aggressive policing. On the other hand, the late ’80s and early ’90s was an era of touchy-feely policing and if its crime rates had continued, Gotham would be a ghost town now.
Given the unprecedented gains in public safety in the last two decades, de Blasio’s revisionism is unworthy even of a Soviet-era Communist.
Then again, he left for Italy days after the death of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who suffered a heart attack and died after cops forcibly took him to the ground, so the mayor is probably trying to make up for his absence by showing his radical base he hasn’t gone soft on cops.
But he’s creating a bigger problem with a broader swath of New Yorkers who appreciate the historic-low crime rates under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. Perhaps de Blasio realizes he and Bratton will never match those records, so he is hoping to delegitimize his predecessors and set the bar low for his tenure. If he has to smear every cop who ever walked a beat or collared a killer to make himself look better, well, that’s business.
But it’s a lousy, cheap business and innocent New Yorkers will be the victims of crime because of de Blasio’s ambition and devotion to the discredited theories of social justice.
The mayor claimed he and Bratton would have “an approach to policing that is constitutional, respectful and compassionate.” He also praised his commissioner for saying that “you can’t break the law to enforce the law.”
Fair enough. But there is another truism that is equally wise, and more relevant to the city of today: Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
Bam bombs with Mideast meddling
President Obama found numerous ways to make the United States less relevant in the last six years, but he came up with a new one in his misbegotten foray into the Gaza war: He’s so wrong that even Israel feels it’s safe to ignore him.
The decision by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reject Obama’s pressure for a unilateral ceasefire and instead widen the campaign against Hamas reflects a new low in the Obama presidency.
More important, it is impossible to argue with Netanyahu’s decision.
The terror threat is so grave that Israeli military leaders, bolstered by strong public support, believe they can’t return to business-as-usual. They aim to deliver a knockout punch to the rocket arsenal and the tunnel network to make sure Hamas doesn’t emerge intact and ready for another war.
Yet Obama’s push for negotiations would have won for Hamas in peace what it failed to win in war. Secretary of State John Kerry was advocating terms that would have granted many of the terrorists’ demands, and guaranteed more conflict. One journalist accused Kerry of acting like Hamas’ lawyer, and a top Israeli politician told Kerry to “leave us alone.”
Either that, or get on board. With most Arabs, led by Egypt and including many Palestinians, agreeing with Israel that a weakened Hamas means a more peaceful region, this is a rare moment of consensus and a chance for real progress.
But the White House’s blunder gave the Palestinians hope they will be rewarded for their provocation — and a reason to keep fighting.
Mr. President, whose side are you on?
Cuomo ‘success’ a failure
In a tortured defense of his shutdown of the Moreland Commission, Gov. Andrew Cuomo raised expectations that could come back to bite him. He called the panel “a phenomenal success.”
In plain English, that should mean it made a huge dent in ending corruption and we won’t see another wave of indictments and convictions of state officials.
In truth, Cuomo pulled the plug prematurely after legislators agreed to modest improvements in ethics laws.
Those changes don’t touch the transactional nature of Albany, where every action, and even lack of action, is part of a deal. That’s what Moreland was supposed to change.
It didn’t, so look out below.
Soccer punched
Vladimir Putin’s bloody hands in Ukraine are sparking a movement to strip Russia of the 2018 World Cup.
This is just wrong, according to FIFA, soccer’s governing body. It says the games will go on.
That probably means the 2022 event, scheduled for Qatar, also will go on, despite questions about whether bribery greased the selection process. Then there’s the pesky issue of Qatar’s sponsoring Hamas terrorists and embarrassment over the deaths of migrant workers building the stadiums.
Add it up and there’s only one fair solution: North Korea deserves the 2026 World Cup. Assuming, of course, there still is a world.