Yesterday's New York Times editorial blasted the NYPD’s infantile tactics of the past few weeks as “reckless,” “deplorable,” “a coordinated escalation of a war between the police unions and Mr. de Blasio,” and “a hijacking of law-enforcement policy by those who do not set law-enforcement policy.” NYT didn’t pull many punches, properly excoriating the rogue insurrection and Commissoner Bratton for his insistence on Stop & Frisk, a policy which the Mayor strongly opposed and on which he won a landslide election of 73%.
The truth is the police and Murdoch's hate-machine propaganda have been fear-mongering that the city is going to become an open crime zone since the night of "librul" DeBlasio's election. The frothing dogs are salivating now that they're on the attack. But the public's justifiably negative perception of the NYPD has perhaps also never been so vocal.
“Mayor Bill de Blasio has been in office barely a year, and already forces of entropy are roaming the streets, turning their backs on the law, defying civil authority and trying to unravel the social fabric.
No, not squeegee-men or turnstile-jumpers. We’re talking about the cops….
The problem is not that a two-week suspension of 'broken windows' policing is going to unleash chaos in the city. The problem is that cops who refuse to do their jobs and revel in showing contempt to their civilian leaders are damaging the social order all by themselves.”
But the Times did pull a couple of punches. They didn't go deep into the nefarious back room political motivations, nor the possibility of criminal behavior by the protesting cops.
Thom Hartmann at the Big Picture and Max Blumenhtal of Alternet did. Blumenthal had any eye-opening article about the calculated political shenanigans "How Cops and GOP Are Teaming Up to Undermine the BlackLivesMatter Movement." It’s worth a full read. This should be parsed in light of the police contract negotiations that Bloomberg cynically dumped on Deblasio.
Apparently an ex-cop from Queens and head of a Tea Party club has concocted something called “Operation All Out.” It’s a coordinated Republican Party plan to channel police anger at DeBlasio into a partisan political campaign.
“Joe Concannon, a failed Republican State Senate candidate and current president of the Tea Party-aligned Queens Village Republican Club, is the main organizer of the burgeoning anti-de Blasio protest effort. The retired NYPD captain and former Giuliani advisor is a close ally of Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch. Lynch generated national headlines — and cheers from rank and file cops — when he claimed that de Blasio “has blood on [his] hands” just hours after Ismaaiyl Brinsley murdered Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.”
He’s filed for non-profit status to fund his anti-Deblasio campaign. Already on the schedule is a a demonstration in Queens next week, one in cop-heavy Breezy Point (Queens also) next month and City Hall after. He’s appealing not only to his local RW extremist cronies but also to the broader Republican contingent.
“Jack Coughlin, the treasurer of the NYPD Superior Officers Association, responded by proposing 'a rally held in Breezy Point in March when the weather will be better [that] could attract thousands of pro-cop supporters to counter the professional anti-cop organizers.' Coughlin went on to urge Concannon to pressure Republican representatives Peter King and Lee Zeldin and NY GOP State Chairman Ed Cox to 'get the House Homeland Committee to hold public hearings on who’s financing Al Sharpton’s anti-cop protest.'
National Police Defense Foundation executive director Joseph Occhipinti chimed in to offer help in coordinating the demonstrations. 'I would suggest that everything go through the [Patrick Lynch’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association] for any organized protests,' he added. A former agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Occhipinti was convicted in 1991 of conducting illegal searches and narrowly escaped jail time for allegedly stealing $16,000 from his victims. When the US attorney who secured his conviction, Jeh Johnson, was appointed by Obama to direct the Department of Homeland Security last year, Occhipinti rushed to the right-wing writer Charles C. Johnson to complain.”
Here's the crux of what Blumenthal thinks is happening: “Meanwhile,
Republican operatives see a chance to do fatal damage to a rising Democratic star and close Clinton ally by resurrecting the kind of racial backlash politics that won them urban white votes during the Nixon era.”
Meanwhile, Hartmann brought up a fascinating legal condemnation of the cops protesting. In The Big Picture segment below he offers suggestions as to, “What To Do About The Police Turning Their Backs?” He points to several legal cases that specifically prohibit civil servants from making political statements while in uniform.
It's worth mentioning that CNN or any corporate mainstream media are probably not going to cover these angles at all (if you agree, you should probably hit "new tab" now and go to YouTube, pull up The Big Picture on RT, The Young Turks, Democracy Now, Al Jazeera, - and subscribe to their channels). Only independent investigative journalism is going to dig in.
Hartmann and Blumenthal discuss both the issues of illegal prosecutable police political protest and the coordinated:
It appears that Bratton’s got a major problem on his hands. He's out defending Stop & Frisk, part of a discredited Broken Windows policy, and specifically, something DeBlasio vowed to discontinue, which has been ruled unconstitutional by the NY courts. How does the Mayor square with Bratton's animated defense of it in a recent press conference?
He's got rogue cops who need to be brought to heel now. He should start by collecting video and photos of the cops that turned their back on the ringleaders and fine or fire them. Then fire the guys who file the most “resisting arrests” charges. They're giving the his other guys a bad name.
This is a police force that has cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion in settlements, has a monumental community relations problem because of Broken Windows, has fudged its stats, has beaten down and harassed its own black officers.
Police chat forums are rife with political sabotage and ugly racism directed at the Mayor and his family. They're filled with NYPD officer referring to minorities as "savage animals," openly entertaining violent fantasies, all kinds of typical of white supremacist bigoted garbage that should not permitted of those on any force carrying lethal weapons and charged with securing the peace.
The citizens of NYC are uneasy about their cops. They're also suffering from being forced to live in the shadows of unimaginable, ostentatious 1% wealth and their hostile takeover of the city, where working class rents are skyrocketing, high-rise condos brazenly crop up everywhere, high end eateries, and boutique shopping crowd out our neighborhoods, right next to corporate franchise chains and banks on every corner.
I fear that these cops, who in their defense do have to engage with some of the worst scenes in society, are capable of doing some really heinous things in their confused and malleable current state. But they need a dose of reality. Their sector suffers greatly when they don't condemn the wrong doers amongst their ranks. The severity of all this must be attended to immediately by the Mayor and Commissoner.
[ADDENDUM]
Former NY Times reporter and current Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos Bob Herbert interviewed a member of the counsel that defeated Stop & Frisk in NY. It's a really good insight into the legal parameters and unconstitutionality of Stop & Frisk, as well as an explanation of the Broken Windows policy which it falls under.
While Gothamist had a timely piece today confirming the NYPD's penchant for fear-mongering, called "Fear City: The Insane Pamphlet the NYPD Used to Terrorize 1970s New York."
The Esquire piece "The CIA & NYPD: Perilous Insubordination In Our Democracy", calls out the RW propagandists' penchant for incendiary hyperbole, which, despite the blatant lies and mischaracterization, serves their political purpose of steering a pro-police/anti-protest media narrative (the m.o. of Murdoch has always a blustery disregard for facts if it suits his political purpose, then issue a retraction later that few notice, after the damage is done)
In response, and at the encouragement of television hucksters like Joe Scarborough, police union blowhards like Patrick Lynch, political zombies like George Pataki, and comical fascists like Rudolph Giuliani, the NYPD is acting in open rebellion against Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, and the civil power he represents over them. This is an incredibly perilous time for democracy at the most basic levels.
(And we should keep the banal red-blue, right-left kabuki of our politics largely out of the discussion, if we can. Yes, it is confounding to hear it argued that rightwing cop killers are always "lone wolves," but that Brinsley took his marching orders from Al Sharpton. And, yes, any time people try to tie clinic bombers and doctor-killers to the more "respectable" anti-choice movements, we get howls of outraged innocence. This latest episode is replete with hypocrisy, but that's the least dangerous thing about it.)"