![]() ![]() His violence toward Wilson, and toward the convenience-store owner he had strong-armed, was wiped from the record. He was turned into a civil rights martyr. The elite’s desperation to participate in what they hopefully viewed as their own modern-day civil rights crusade was patent in the sanctification of Michael Brown, the would-be cop killer. The New York police commissioner called the union letter “a step too far.” It’s inappropriate.” The city’s elites, from Cardinal Timothy Dolan on down, reprimanded the union. De Blasio responded primly on "The View": “It’s divisive. The head of the officers’ union, Patrick Lynch, circulated a form allowing officers to request that the mayor not attend their funeral if they were killed in the line of duty-an understandable reaction to de Blasio’s insult. New York police officers were rightly outraged at de Blasio’s calumny. But facts do not matter when one is crusading to bring justice to a city beset by “centuries of racism.” The NYPD fatally shot eight individuals in 2013, six of them black, all posing a risk to the police, compared with scores of blacks killed by black civilians. The Garner death was a tragic aberration in a record of unparalleled restraint. There is no New York City institution more dedicated to the proposition that “black lives matter” than the New York Police Department thousands of black men are alive today who would have been killed years ago had data-driven policing not brought down the homicide levels of the early 1990s. If he really believes that his son faces a significant risk from the police, he is ignorant of the realities of crime and policing in the city that he was elected to lead. The mayor’s irresponsible rhetoric was a violation of his role as the city’s leader and as its main exponent of the law. “It should be self-evident, but our history requires us to say ‘black lives matter.’ It was not years of racism that brought us to this day, or decades of racism, but centuries of racism.” De Blasio added that he worries “every night” about the “dangers” his biracial son, Dante, might face from “officers who are paid to protect him.” (Recall that the 350-pound asthmatic Garner had resisted arrest for the crime of selling loose cigarettes officers brought him to the ground, provoking a fatal heart attack.) “People are saying: ‘Black lives matter,’” de Blasio announced after the grand jury concluded. ![]() In advance of a trip to Washington for a White House summit on policing, he told the press that a “scourge” of killings by police was “based not just on decades, but centuries of racism.” De Blasio embroidered on that theme several days later, after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict an officer for homicide in Garner’s death. Among all the posturers, none was so preening as New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio. ![]()
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