Michael Goodwin

Michael Goodwin

Metro

De Blasio’s slur against NYPD imperils us all

That Mayor Bill de Blasio sure has a way with words. He says, with a straight face, that he has great respect for the police. Only instead of R-E-S-P-E-C-T, he is guilty of an S-L-U-R.

Determined not to let a crisis go to waste, the mayor has spent the last two days cranking up the volume and the vitriol of his anti-cop agenda. Predictably, he trots out his son, Dante, to put a personal spin on police-black relations, saying he is fearful the biracial teen will end up in a confrontation with a cop.

Imagine that. The city is in turmoil over the Staten Island case and the mayor throws gasoline on the fire by painting the entire police force as a bunch of white racist brutes. Has he no shame?

He certainly has no facts. In addition to the not-so-minor detail that the police force is now an impressive mix of races and ethnic groups, crime statistics leave no doubt that any harm to befall Dante de Blasio likely would come from another nonwhite, non-cop male. Those stats show that, year in, year out, about 90 percent of homicides involve a nonwhite man killing another nonwhite man.

That is the most compelling fact of murder, yet it’s the one de Blasio and his fellow travelers on the loony left never mention. To do so would require them to acknowledge the disproportionate levels of hideous violence that continue to ravage innocent people in black and Latino neighborhoods.

The mayor and his ilk don’t have the courage to confront that heartbreaking crisis, so they take the easy and ideologically convenient course of attacking cops, as though they committed the 330 murders in the city last year.

“We need a mayor to stand up with and for us,” police union head Pat Lynch said yesterday. He said his members feel as if de Blasio is “throwing them under the bus.”

That’s exactly what he’s doing, but the cops have plenty of company under the wheels. For in trashing them, de Blasio abandons any pretext that he is the mayor of all New Yorkers. He has sliced and diced the city, and decided that he will represent only the small piece that voted for him. Everybody else can take a hike, or get under the bus.

That includes anyone who trusts the cops and who recognizes with gratitude the man-made miracle the NYPD has achieved over the last 20 years. If you are one of those people, you are now a political orphan, without representation in City Hall.

The man in charge, by making common cause with cop haters, race baiters and violent anarchists, has abandoned his post to join the revolution.

This is a profound moment in modern Gotham history, one that, I am convinced, will set the city on a downhill course. There is no way to believe that slurring cops, undercutting them and turning on them will not have a huge impact on crime.

As union boss Lynch rightly suggested, cops who feel abandoned by their ostensible commander will be confused and uncertain, always second-guessing themselves because the mayor will. Their hesitancy will embolden the criminal class, and we’ve seen what happens then.

To believe otherwise is to believe that New York became the safest large city in American because the people who live here are inherently more moral and more peaceful than the residents of Detroit, Chicago, Newark, Baltimore or Atlanta, all of which have sky-high crime and murder rates.

Nor did New York achieve its distinction by chance or divine providence. Aggressive, consistent, professional policing did it under the leadership of mayors whose first instinct was to trust and support the cops.

That’s not to suggest every cop is a hero every day. A force with 35,000 human beings will have some bad apples, and some very rotten ones. Even the best ones will make mistakes, and there will be tragedies of the kind we saw on Staten Island.

But mayors make mistakes, too, and theirs have larger and longer-lasting consequences. Bill de Blasio has just made such a mistake, and all New York will pay the price for his folly.