Who’s in charge of crime-fighting these days: NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton — or the Rev. Al Sharpton?
We’re no longer sure. Overnight, Eric Garner’s death has moved from a human tragedy to the latest front in a war on a police force that has made Gotham America’s safest big city.
The battles are many: from Bill de Blasio’s mayoral campaign suggesting our cops are racist to federal Judge Shira Scheindlin’s biased rulings on police practices to Sharpton’s demands for a federal civil-rights investigation.
When the story broke, Bratton rightly noted cops can’t walk away from someone refusing to be arrested. But he’s since ordered all 35,000 officers retrained, even before an investigation found wrongdoing, and said he wouldn’t be surprised by a federal investigation.
On one thing we agree with Sharpton. This is a test of the de Blasio administration. Especially for Bratton, who up to now has had it both ways: attacking his predecessors while continuing to defend policies such as stop and frisk as a valid police tool.
The emergence Monday of a new video of another possible chokehold incident, this one involving a pregnant woman, shows the issue is not going away any time soon.
No one is asking Bratton to excuse inexcusable cop behavior, if that’s what a fair investigation finds. But he needs to stand up for an NYPD being unjustly smeared.
In short, Bratton must be as clear as Sharpton is about what this fight is really about.
This means forcing Mayor de Blasio to choose whether he will stand up for a police force that has proved it knows how to bring down crime — or surrender to activist supporters who want to bring down the entire police force.