With gun violence on a rocket-ride in the wrong direction and the usual suspects agitating for unilateral disarmament of the NYPD, Mayor Mush yesterday went to church.
That is, Bill de Blasio sat down with Timothy Cardinal Dolan and other religious leaders at Dolan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral residence in advance of Saturday’s march to protest the death of Eric Garner.
The goal was to calm tension, which is fine. But it’s no substitute for coherent leadership — a commodity in perilously short supply since Garner, a petty criminal and a long-time neighborhood nuisance, died while resisting arrest on Staten Island July 17.
SI District Attorney Dan Donovan has taken the case before a grand jury — and while that will by no means be the end of it, it can be said that at least one city official is doing his duty as defined by law and custom.
The mayor, in contrast, split for an Italian vacation shortly after the incident, allowing bitterness to fester in the vacuum.
Then he convened a public “summit” during which the always-helpful Al Sharpton did what he does so well: Make matters worse.
He threatened de Blasio to his face — and the mayor took it, mumbling pieties when a firm rebuke was in order.
Sharpton wasn’t buying it, anyway: He made it clear that he and his allies want Giuliani-Bloomberg policing standards gone — and will accept nothing less.
De Blasio keeps trying to talk his way past this. But he can’t, because he basically agrees with Sharpton.
He became mayor in the first place by embracing the obnoxious notion that aggressive anti-crime strategies are implicitly racist — as are the cops and commanders who carry them out.
The administration started backing away on policing before de Blasio even took office. The predictable, appalling results: Shootings are up 32 percent year-on-year for the four weeks ending Aug. 10.
And that doesn’t account for the two dead and 23 wounded from this past weekend’s gunplay.
Now comes a dramatic, and immensely ironic, split between three of the city’s most influential unions — the United Federation of Teachers on the one hand, and the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association and the Sergeants Benevolent Association on the other.
The UFT unambiguously endorses Sharpton’s Saturday demonstration; the cops, unsurprisingly, bitterly resent that support.
This could be a teaching moment, but won’t be. Because:
- Nobody will speak honestly about race-related social dysfunction. Elected officials would sooner set themselves on fire.
- And the UFT’s motives have much more to do with cementing alliances in its unremitting war on public-school reform than with the NYPD or policing policy.
Teachers assigned to disruptive schools and cops posted to dangerous, crime-wracked precincts have a lot more in common than is generally appreciated:
Each profession, in its own way, is expected to keep the peace in circumstances where far too many people are dedicating themselves to disrupting it.
For all the differences, learning can’t happen in chaotic classrooms, just as lives can’t be fully lived in crime-ravaged neighborhoods.
But when teachers “fail,” only rarely are there consequences. Nobody even speaks of it, and everybody gets raises.
When cops “fail,” the clamor is for prosecutions — or, at the very least, for a return to the failed policies of the past.
Teachers, of course, “fail” tens of thousands of times a year. If you doubt it, check the city’s abysmal public-school graduation statistics.
Cops “fail” hardly ever — and when they do, a close look at the details almost always reveals ambiguities and uncertainties. Cops must be perfect — or be damned.
And so to the supreme irony: Nobody seriously disputes that the only real cure for social dysfunction, and for endemic crime, is effective public education.
But the chief impediment to real public-school reform in New York City has long been the United Federation of Teachers.
Charter schools have been successful — not all, but enough of them so that the good news can no longer honestly be ignored.
Yet the UFT is in a death struggle with charters — because they threaten union jobs — just as it uses its muscle to protect schools that don’t educate and teachers who can’t teach.
And it’s gotten a lot of help in all this from the NAACP and other minority-heavy outfits. The UFT endorsement of the march doubtless is payback of sorts.
Now the whole mob is going to war on behalf of people and policies that will make city schools even worse — and city streets more dangerous than they’ve been in a generation.
And Mayor Mush, once more along for the ride, has nothing to say.