Poor, Poor POPO: NYPD Casts Black Lives Matter Protesters as Terrorists

Saturday, December 20 was the day that Ismaaiyl Brinsley gunned down two NYPD officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, while they sat in their patrol car in Bed-Stuy. As a result, for the last two weeks the Black Lives Matter protest movement has been crowded out of the newspapers, replaced by the ceremonial charade of Patrolmen's Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch taking shots at NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and de Blasio meekly, apologetically replying.

The mainstream media prefers this type of reporting -- tit-for-tat squabbles between camps of officials -- to actually covering popular movements because it requires less work. The reporter gets a quote from one camp, a reply from the other camp, rehashes the main markers of the conflict followed by next steps, and Shazam! Story finished. That is what you have in "Police Unions’ Leaders Air Grievances in 2-Hour Meeting With de Blasio," by Matt Flegenheimer and J. David Goodman.

One interesting quote by a police union official in the Flegenheimer and Goodman piece conflates the Black Lives Matter protests with the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks of 9/11:

Officials with the administration seemed to bet that some of the union leaders might act as peacekeepers, or at least supply more measured voices, in the conflict with the patrolmen’s union. 

However, in an email to members on Tuesday, Roy T. Richter, president of the Captains’ Endowment Association, said that he would allow the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association to “lead any conversation.” He added that he stood “in solidarity with them as they express raw outrage against the forces that caused the coldblooded assassination of our two brother police officers.” 

Mr. Richter compared the emotional climate of the day to that immediately following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He wrote that he had met privately with Mr. de Blasio — “at his request” — just before Christmas “to give him a blunt critique of the hostile antipolice environment” in the city.

There you have it. Police union leadership blaming protesters for the death of Liu and Ramos, comparing the Black Lives Matter protests and the 9/11 terror attacks. This is the direction we are headed: lawful protest conflated with terrorism.

To highlight the imbalanced, aggrieved state of mind dominant now in the NYPD is yesterday's report by Al Baker and J. David Goodman, "Arrest Statistics Decline Sharply; Police Unions Deny an Organized Slowdown." The NYPD is engaged in a form of wildcat sit-down strike, refusing to make arrests:

. . . [T]he latest official statistics came in. 

Arrests for crimes large and small, as well as tickets for minor infractions, are down drastically across the city. The department has not said whether it believes that officers are acting in concert — as a result of a specific job action — or whether the officers’ deaths produced a spontaneous response.

The two precincts most directly affected by the deaths — the 79th, where Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were gunned down as they sat in their patrol car on a Brooklyn street; and the 84th, where they were usually assigned — saw a single criminal summons in the week that ended Sunday, according to Police Department statistics. Officers in those precincts wrote no parking or traffic tickets. By contrast, the combined tally of criminal summonses alone during the same week last year reached 130, the department statistics showed. 

Mr. Bratton said on Monday that a “weeklong period of mourning” and demonstrations that were straining resources were contributing to the drop-off in arrests and summonses. But he said the slowdown should not concern New Yorkers. “I would point out it has not had an impact on the city’s safety at all,” Mr. Bratton said. 

A top union official flatly denied that there was a job action and pointed to the orders to double up and the need to police demonstrations as the main reasons. 

“No one has sanctioned a slowdown or stoppage,” said Edward Mullins, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association. “That is not something that anybody came out and said to do.” 

He added: “We have demonstrations every night of the week, to which cops are being pulled into every night. We have had two officers killed that has changed the everyday duties of what we are doing, and one of those changes is the consistency of patrol cars backing each other up on radio assignments.” 

He said summonses were simply not a priority at moments like this. 

Still, one senior police official who reviewed precinct-level data across the city said the decline had the signs of an organized effort and was continuing this week. 

It is not uncommon for a grieving station house to ease up on enforcement for a brief period. Enforcement numbers can fluctuate from station house to station house, and from week to week, for a number of other reasons, too, including shifts in personnel or directives from commanders. The holidays can also be a factor. 

But the drop-off in activity in Bedford-Stuyvesant and in Downtown Brooklyn could not explain the sharp slowdown in routine enforcement in each of the city’s 77 police precincts, from the 120th in Staten Island to the 47th in the Bronx.

In the week after Officers Ramos and Liu were killed on Dec. 20, the number of summonses for minor criminal offenses, as well as those for parking and traffic violations, decreased by more than 90 percent versus the same week a year earlier. And arrests over seven major categories of felony offenses were nearly 40 percent lower, the numbers show.

My neighborhood was protester ground zero for the historic "Battle in Seattle." For several weeks following the WTO my perception was that policing of the Capitol Hill neighborhood effectively ceased. This was the police's way of saying, "You rise up against us, we will find a way to get back at you." New York City is experiencing something similar.

And all of this in an environment where crime continues to drop (J. David Goodman and Al Baker, "Murders in New York Drop to a Record Low, but Officers Aren’t Celebrating"). So clearly we are dealing here with a sense of police entitlement under siege.

And while for the last two weeks the Gray Lady has dropped her focus on the Black Lives Matter protests, which continue across the country, choosing instead to follow the NYPD tantrum, she published a terrific unsigned editorial the other day, "When New York City Police Walk Off the Job":

The list of [police] grievances adds up to very little, unless you look at it through the magnifying lens of resentment fomented by union bosses and right-wing commentators. The falling murder rate, the increased resources for the department, the end of quota-based policing, which the police union despised, the mayor’s commitment to “broken-windows” policing — none of that matters, because many cops have latched on to the narrative that they are hated, with the mayor orchestrating the hate. 

It’s a false narrative. Mr. de Blasio was elected by a wide margin on a promise to reform the policing excesses that were found unconstitutional by a federal court. He hired a proven reformer, Mr. Bratton, who had achieved with the Los Angeles Police Department what needs doing in New York. The furor that has gripped the city since the Garner killing has been a complicated mess. But what New Yorkers expect of the Police Department is simple: 

1. Don’t violate the Constitution. 

2. Don’t kill unarmed people. 

To that we can add: 

3. Do your jobs. The police are sworn public servants, and refusing to work violates their oath to serve and protect. Mr. Bratton should hold his commanders and supervisors responsible, and turn this insubordination around.

I think the NYPD must be sensing now that business as usual is not going to fly here. But rather than moderate its messaging, it appears to be doubling down. The story by Al Baker this morning, "Man Threatened to Kill Officers, Authorities Say," plays up the poor, poor POPO motif:

The Police Department has now investigated in the past dozen days more than 90 threats it deemed serious among the hundreds that have streamed in from 311, 911, online postings and tips, including eight made on Wednesday through social media sites. 

The first step in analyzing them is to separate angry speech, hate speech and a threat “where someone is indicating they intend to act,” said John J. Miller, the deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. 

“What we’ve found in a number of these are, you’ve got dangerous people with serious criminal records, some of whom possessed weapons, who are making these threats,” he said. “And in other cases we’ve found guys who are big and bad over the computer but when the cops knock at their door, they are reduced to tears, saying they were drunk and never really meant anything by it.”

The way that the NYPD has responded to the Black Lives Matter protests after the Liu and Ramos shooting has been fascinating. Petulant, scared, vulnerable yet tough, in command and demanding obeisance from the citizens and elected leaders of the metropolis, it is a portrait of a balling infant coming to understand that mother's body is separate. Baby is on his own.