NYPD turning its back on DeBlasio

[Dick Whitman]

There's a photo of accompanying the NYT editorial about it today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/30/o...icmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&_r=1

The NYT thinks its a bush league move. I think it's juvenile, too.

My cop friends loved it.

 

[LongTimeListener]

Cops are awful at PR. So ham-handed. The St. Louis PD was on display for this too when they said the Rams apologized, and the Rams said "uh, no we didn't."

Now they aren't making arrests. A "slowdown." That'll learn 'em, don't do your job to show how valuable you are!

 

[The Big Ragu]

As bad as you might think the cops are at PR, De Blasio has been much worse at it since taking office -- not just with regard to the cops. He's a putz. I saw Bo Dietl calling him "Big Bird." It's pretty funny.

What the cops are doing may be hamhanded and juvenile, but the cops are winning in the court of public approval from what I can see.

There is an emergency meeting today in Queens between De Blasio and the heads of the five police unions. He really needs to do something to make some peace. I am not sure it is possible at this point, but hopefully the cops know that if they push the grudge too far it is going to backfire on them.

 

[Dick Whitman]

Cops are the new military. 'Muricans love 'em, go crazy for 'em.

Mark my word: The police role in pregame ceremonies and so forth are going to increase exponentially in the next few months and years. We'll get to the point where police will be announced at games and get rousing standing ovations, like military members do now.

 

[Ace]

I agree with ****. Cops can do no wrong. Specially when they are wrong.

 

[LongTimeListener]

Every cop will admit in the abstract that there are bad cops.

No cop will acknowledge that the cop who shot Tamir Rice a second and a half after getting out of his car was a bad cop.

 

[ringer]

Maybe it made a point this first time, but when the cops do it repeatedly it becomes a parody of itself. And to do it at a funeral is outrageously tacky and declasse. Besides, what are they pissed about? That Di Blasio said he had a chat with his half-black son about how to treat cops with caution because his son will be singled out because of his race? To be politically correct, he should have kept that on the down-low but isn't that clearly the world we live in?

 

[LongTimeListener]

Cops would never acknowledge that racial profiling exists. They still argue that they threw 41 shots at Amadou Diallo not because he was black but because his movements were too sudden. And no statistical breakdown or psychological study is going to move them off that point.

De Blasio having some level of disagreement with them on that, therefore, amounted to being a traitor against the blue.

 

[cranberry]

De Blasio did absolutely nothing wrong. He campaigned on creating better relations between minority communities and the police and brought in Bratton to help make that happen. The union leader, Patrick Lynch, seems to be a real asshole. If the cops have hurt feelings, **** 'em. There was and is a problem with the NYC police that needs to be corrected. The bigger underlying issue is that they're involved in contract negotiations.

Ragu, Bo Dietl is a ****ing moron. I'll take the other side of any argument in which he's involved.

 

[The Big Ragu]

Bo Dietl is a moron. That is why it was funny. De Blasio was even being ridiculed by him, and Dietl, who usually struggles to sound coherent, had him pegged really well.

And De Blasio has done little right in his first year. He campaigned on meaningless rhetoric -- some of it divisive. Few people were paying attention, so it largely got ignored. He got into office and immediately got smacked down by Andrew Cuomo over his school ideas, and since it's been one gaffe after another. He's struggled with the reality that being a successful mayor of NY means doing a lot of little, unsexy things -- kissing asses of interests you don't particularly care about, getting the snow plows out, keeping police / fire / sanitation happy with their contracts, keeping businesses from leaving for NJ, keeping the MTA working, finding a way to budget successfully when there isn't enough money. He doesn't seem to like the actual job. About all he's accomplished is being the protestor-in-chief. Which is a great job. It's just not what MOST people really want of the mayor.

 

[cranberry]

What exactly was "pegged well" about Bo Dietl's attempt to make fun of De Blasio's size? You don't like De Blasio because he's a progressive liberal. The fact is that he's had a very good first year, including making his most important campaign promise -- universal pre-K -- a reality. He's also gotten contracts done with more than half the city's workforce, including the teachers, something that Bloomberg wasn't interested in doing. He'll get a contract done with the police, too. I like that he's mixing it up with Cuomo who is a calculating, scheming phony who won't live up to his dad in 10 lifetimes.

And along the way he's also made himself a national progressive leader, overshadowed only by Elizabeth Warren.

 

[The Big Ragu]

A great first year -- he's very close to getting that important ban on horse carriages in central park through. And he's forced some developers to subsidize "middle income" people with apartments (i.e. -- people earning $90K a year). . ... and he gave Al Sharpton a place on the podium. ... and he stood by mute as a mob of protestors shut down the Brooklyn Bridge. How progressive.

 

[cranberry]

I'm glad the demonstrators shut down the Brooklyn Bridge and I'm glad New York has a mayor who takes people's right to demonstrate seriously and actually listens to them. I'm also glad he's pushing for more affordable housing and that legislation was passed to expand paid sick leave and raise the living wage. He's been an eloquent spokesman for the people who previously didn't have a voice in New York.

 

[The Big Ragu]

In an orderly city, you need a permit to demonstrate. Great, if you want to practice civil disobedience -- I admire you. But try to shut down the Brooklyn Bridge and you should expect to be in cuffs and booking. That is the price of your civil disobedience. And the mayor of New York should not be ordering the cops to stand aside and NOT keep order. For all kinds of reasons. In NY, that leads to tensions, which inevitably leads to strife that boils over. Also, when the GWB thing happened under Chris Christie, everyone made a big deal about the ambulance that couldn't get through. That was why it was so terrible. Is this different when the mayor allows the Brooklyn Bridge to be shut down by a mob with his approval?

Your "affordable housing" skews the market even more. It subsidizes people who aren't poor anyhow, and at the expense of developers who have to jack the prices even more on the 99 percent of the apartments they aren't blackmailed over, driving up prices for everyone except the token group that benefit from the mayor's largesse (but not with his own money!). And driving up the cost for employees is a stupid thing to do in a city that prior to the 1990s was struggling to attract and retain those businesses and was teetering on the edge of financial disaster again. He's trying to undo the one thing the city has gotten right to the past two decades.

He's a spokesman alright. But not particularly eloquent. He's a bore. And as much as you love him, you're mostly alone on this. His latest approvals are pitiful and his disapprovals are pretty high. Not that that is what makes him a putz. It's the fact that he can't shoot straight as mayor.

 

[dooley_womack1]

This is a clash of the titans I look forward to checking in on. Not DeBlasio and the cops, but Cran and Ragu. Anyhoo, having cop in-laws, I know that there's definitely a feeling of infallibility on the force. But these things run in cycles. Through the 50s and early 1960s, cops were golden, then over the next 15 years became pigs and a bunch of malfeasors that various Serpicos uncovered.

 

[The Big Ragu]

It shouldn't be all or nothing with the cops. There are way too many of those malfeasors (I have never used that word. Is it a word, cause I kind of like it?) still around. And the cops run a little too unchecked by a sheep population that doesn't question enough and assert their basic rights. We shouldn't be living for the cops. They should be mostly invisible, even in a place like NYC and we should be free to go about our business.

That doesn't mean all, or most, cops are bad guys. But that doesn't matter to me. When I see one in uniform, he or she is not my friend. I automatically don't trust them -- I have been given way too many reasons not to.

That is honestly my attitude toward the cops. It would also be absolutely inappropriate for me to express it that way if I chose to be the mayor. And if I lit that fire by grandstanding and trying to create division within the city, the inevitable fallout would be on me.

 

[Vombatus]

What's the mayor got against carriages and horses? Did he **** Mr. Ed and is afraid he will talk?

 

[da man]

What's the mayor got against carriages and horses? Did he **** Mr. Ed and is afraid he will talk?

Only if Wilbur is doing the interview for the Post.

 

[Walter Lippmann]

Dietl won me over with his hard-hitting investigation of Subway.

 

[cortez]

I wonder what the NY Post reaction would be if NYC school teachers came to school but refused to teach because they were mad at the mayor