Former city Comptroller William Thompson’s little-engine-that-could mayoral campaign took a turn for the truly ugly over the weekend, when the candidate stood up in a predominately black church in Brooklyn and grossly slandered the NYPD.
Seeking to turn a profit from the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman tragedy, Thompson laid it on as thick as it comes:
“Here in New York City, we have institutionalized Mr. Zimmerman’s suspicion with a policy that all but requires our police officers to [profile] young black and Latino men . . . as Trayvon was profiled,” he said — leaving hanging in the air the logical concluding clause: And then murdered.
Thompson is so wrong on so many different levels that it’s difficult to know where to begin, but here are two questions:
* Will Thompson ever again be able to look Police Commissioner Ray Kelly in the eye?
* Why in the world would he say such a thing?
The first question is personal; it’s a test of character for Thompson. But the answer to No. 2 is as clear as a mountain spring.
Politics.
Yesterday’s Quinnipiac University mayoral poll is the second in a row to show Thompson, who is African-American, well positioned to win a Democratic primary-election runoff in October. But first he must get in the runoff, and the polls also show him lagging badly among black voters (to the benefit, oddly enough, of cyber-flasher Anthony Weiner).
So, what to do?
Well, wave the bloody shirt, of course. That is, recast a tragedy as a martyrdom, regardless of the damage that will do to the truth, to social harmony in New York and to Thompson’s ability to govern should he in fact become mayor.
Thompson apparently feels the need to get beyond his earlier measured support for a muscular NYPD anti-crime presence in high-crime police precincts — a presence that has prompted the hopelessly politicized attack on cops’ use of “stop, question and frisk” tactics.
Indeed, Thompson even had pushed back against the standard left-wing demand for an independent inspector general for the NYPD and similar initiatives.
No doubt this was largely coalition-building — middle-class voters strongly support stop-and-frisk, for example — but there also was a detectable measure of sincerity in his rationale: “I’m the one who has to worry about my son being stopped and frisked,” he said. “But I’m worried also about my son being shot by someone who’s a member of a gang in the street.”
And worry he should, given the statistics.
But black voters — Thompson’s natural base — strongly oppose the program, and the always-odious Al Sharpton seems to have conditioned his own support for Thompson on unequivocal opposition to it: “This is not a marginal issue,” threatens The Rev.
Thus the shameful Kelly-as-Zimmerman analogy.
But, while dramatic, it’s probably not enough to please Sharpton. His continuing influence depends largely on his ability to keep supplicants dancing in public — so doubtless he’s planning further humiliations for Thompson’s immediate future. Just to make clear who’s boss.
What adjustments will then be required of the candidate’s carefully crafted campaign isn’t clear. But in a race as close as this one — yesterday’s Q-poll shows a statistical three-way dead heat, with Weiner a pile of smoldering wreckage — even subtle shifts could be critical.
Thompson has been chugging along in characteristically low-key fashion for some months now — quietly constructing alliances based on decades of personal connections and political give and take.
How much give, and how much take, remains to be seen; one shudders to think of what went in to Thompson’s endorsement by the always-grasping teachers union, for example.
Yet, for better or for worse, that’s how we govern ourselves. And Thompson’s opponents appear prepared to turn the entire city over to the grabbers; better that half a loaf be stolen than the entire breadbasket, right?
Up to a point.
To play retail politics with people’s lives — and that’s precisely what Thompson did Sunday — should be impermissible.
To so cynically delegitimize the world’s finest urban police department — to cast 35,000 cops as reckless racial-profilers capable of murderous violence — is a grave offense to the NYPD.
And, more important, to the citizens of New York.
Remember Crown Heights? It was a long time ago, but the same issue — contempt for public order — was in play then as it is now.
Does Bill Thompson understand that’s where he’s headed? Does he even care?
Time for some deep soul-searching.