The conventional wisdom in the wake of the Eric Garner decision, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's speech in the wake of that decision, and the killing of two police officers shortly after that, was that de Blasio was finished, that he'd lost the support of not just the police unions but the voters, and he'd finish out the rest of his term in ignominy if he made it that far. Politico's headline on Dec. 22, for instance, shouted "De Blasio's nightmare: New York's mayor has lost the police—and maybe much more than that."
It seemed a little premature to jump to that conclusion. After all, hadn't the people of New York known what they were getting into when they elected de Blasio by a wide margin? The turning point of the whole election, when de Blasio suddenly moved into the lead in the Democratic primary, was the ad that de Blasio ran featuring his 15-year-old son Dante and his towering 'fro, telling the city that his dad would scale back the police's stop-and-frisk policies. Exit polls showed that stop-and-frisk was the decisive issue in his primary victory. It wasn't as if the tensions between de Blasio and the police were unexpected, considering that was part of what he was elected to do, and it wasn't likely that his supporters would suddenly change their minds about that issue.
Fast forward to this Thursday, when Quinnipiac's first poll of New York City since the December 20 officer shootings came out. Despite all the hyperventilating, de Blasio's approvals are still above water. Respondents approve 50/41 of how he's handling crime (which is, in fact, up from where he was in August before the controversy, when he was at 46/46, although he was at 58/23 shortly after taking office in March). Respondents approve of how he's handling relations between blacks and whites 48/42. The one specific area where he's below water is the question of how he's handling relationships between the police and the community, where he's at 41/52, though that's not down much from 46/44 in August.
If anything, the person who fared the worst in the poll is Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, who made inflammatory remarks in the wake of the officer shootings and orchestrated other officers turning their backs on de Blasio. Lynch ends up with 18/39 favorables, while 27 percent say he's a positive influence on the city and 43 percent say negative. A total of 77 percent of respondents said Lynch's comments that de Blasio had "blood on his hands" were "too extreme," while only 17 percent said they were appropriate. And only 27 percent approved of officers turning their backs on de Blasio, while 69 percent disapproved.
We'll dig deeper into the results, especially the crosstabs showing how the results differ widely between the city's boroughs, over the fold:
The results are actually somewhat heartening, because they show the people of New York City are smarter, more even-handed, and capable of handling ambiguity than the pundits give them credit for. The poll shows New Yorkers strongly disapprove of police conduct in the Garner case (66 percent agree "there is absolutely no excuse for the way the police acted" while only 27 percent agree "it is understandable that the police could have acted this way"), and disapprove of the grand jury's decision not to bring charges against the officers by an identical 66-to-27 margin.
Many understand that there are racial disparities in enforcement—63 percent agree that police in the city as a whole are tougher on blacks than on whites, while 29 percent say they treat them the same. And despite all that, they're still able to mentally separate out the bad apples, saying by a 56-to-37 margin that they approve of how NYC police are doing their jobs, and, more importantly, approving by a 71-to-25 margin of how police in their community are doing their jobs.
Nevertheless, if you dig into the crosstabs of the poll, you start seeing big disparities between different segments of New York and how they answer the questions. In particular, there's a gulf (figurative as well as literal) between Staten Island and the rest of the city, which is particularly important in light of the upcoming special election to replace Michael Grimm in the Staten Island-based NY-11.
As you may recall, Richmond County District Attorney Dan Donovan oversaw the grand jury that didn't indict the officers who placed Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold. (Richmond County is coterminous with Staten Island. Each borough of New York City is its own county, with its own criminal justice system.) District attorney is a partisan political position in New York, and Donovan is also a well-known Republican who was the 2010 nominee for New York state attorney general, losing to current AG Eric Schneiderman.
NY-11 covers all of Staten Island. The district also takes in parts of Brooklyn, but the majority of the district is on Staten Island. The seat is currently vacant, thanks to the resignation of Michael Grimm following his guilty plea to tax evasion charges. The date of the special election hasn't been called yet, but Donovan has already locked down the nomination to be the Republican candidate in that special election. (In House special elections in New York, there is no primary. The county party committees select nominees.)
That may seem odd, since Donovan is such a controversial figure in local and even national media, thanks to the failure to indict the officers that killed Garner. You'd think they'd choose less of a lightning rod in what's ostensibly a swing district (Barack Obama won NY-11 52-47 in 2012, though he lost under the same boundaries 48-51 in 2008, one of the few districts anywhere to swing that far in Obama's direction between the two elections).
Staten Island has its own unique political culture though, one that both Grimm and Donovan fit like a glove. It's insular (one of the main reasons that Democrat Domenic Recchia was unable to beat Grimm in November, despite Grimm being under indictment, was that Recchia committed the crime of living in the Brooklyn part of the district). It's very aggrieved, with a Staten Island versus the world, and particularly Staten Island versus the rest of New York City, outlook (reaching a climax in 1993, when it voted to secede from the city). And most of all, it's very strongly—and some might say uncritically—pro-law enforcement, which would explain the election of former FBI agent Grimm and the likely election of prosecutor Donovan.
This is plain to see when you crack open the crosstabs of the new Quinnipiac poll, which breaks down each question not just according to race and age, but also to each borough of New York. Granted, the sample sizes for each borough are too small to be authoritative, but the disparities between Staten Island and the rest of the city are far too large to attribute to sampling error. In almost every category, Staten Island's responses are like a dark mirror-image to the rest of the city.
For instance, on the question of whether there is "no excuse" for how the police treated Garner or whether it's "understandable," the other boroughs said "no excuse" by a wide margin: 69/22 in the Bronx, 68/24 in Brooklyn, 72/22 in Manhattan, and 64/30 in Queens. In Staten Island, "understandable" wins out, by a 56-37 margin. On the question of whether the federal government should bring civil rights charges against the officers involved, Bronx says "yes" by a 65/22 margin, along with 56/35 in Brooklyn, 65/27 in Manhattan, and 57/35 in Queens. Staten Island says "no," by a 60/37 margin.
Take another look at the question about whether the police treat blacks more unfairly than whites, or whether they treat both races the same. In the Bronx, "tougher on blacks" leads "treat them the same" 66/27; in Brooklyn, it's 61/29; in Manhattan, it's 75/18; and in Queens, it's 59/32. But in Staten Island, "treat them the same" leads 53/39. This question is one in particular that has a big racial disparity in how it gets answered, too. Whites throughout the city say "tougher on blacks" by a 53/38 margin, while blacks agree almost unanimously, 87/10. Of course, that correlates with the borough-level results; Staten Island, at 77 percent white, is much whiter than any of the other boroughs.
This also extends to where de Blasio is and isn't popular. On the question of how de Blasio is handling relations between blacks and whites, for instance, de Blasio gets positive marks in all the other boroughs (52/31 in the Bronx, 47/41 in Brooklyn, 55/37 in Manhattan, and 46/44 in Queens). In Staten Island, he gets negative marks, by a 23/73 margin! The one bright spot in all this is that the crosstabs reveal that Lynch's actions were a bridge too far even for his ideal constituency in Staten Island. On the question of whether his "blood on his hands" comment was unacceptable, all boroughs agree (15/78 in the Bronx, 16/80 in Brooklyn, 13/82 in Manhattan, 18/74 in Queens, and 38/60 in Staten Island). Likewise, officers turning their backs on de Blasio gets thumbs down even in Staten Island (28/69 in the Bronx, 27/70 in Brooklyn, 17/78 in Manhattan, 28/66 in Queens, and 47/50 in Staten Island).
How did Staten Island get this way? As I alluded to before, it's largely about demographics. And not just about the fact that it's much whiter than the rest of the city, but, interestingly, because of professions, something that political demographers rarely talk about. Staten Island has a reputation of being where New York City's police officers are heavily concentrated, and that's entirely borne out if you look at census data (here using 2009-2013 American Community Survey data).
If you take all the nation's counties and sort them out according to the percentage of the labor force that's employed as law enforcement officers, the first thing you see at the top of the list is a lot of small counties in rural Texas and rural California. That may seem odd that those counties are so heavily policed, but it's not about police, because the census category of "law enforcement" also includes corrections officers and federal agents like Border Patrol. Tiny Terrell County, Texas, has the highest ratio anywhere (65 of 379 working residents are law enforcement, or 17 percent of the labor force; it's on the Mexican border, so assumedly that's because of Border Patrol agents), followed by Lassen County, California (1,340 out of 9,583 working residents, or 14 percent of the labor force, thanks to the High Desert State Prison and the California Correctional Center).
If you start scrolling down, you'll start seeing larger counties like Yuma County, Arizona (99th overall), and Imperial County, California (104th overall, both at around 4.5 percent law enforcement), but, again, that mostly just tells you where the nation's gulags are, small towns built around the prison-industrial complex. When you get down to Staten Island's Richmond County, you're at 265th overall (out of about 3,000 counties), which doesn't sound that impressive, but when you look at the sheer numbers, you get a sense of what's happening. A whopping 6,021 of 206,255 people in the labor force are in law enforcement, and there's no prison in Staten Island. They're all police. In other words, 2.9 percent of the workers in a county of 472,000 people are all police officers. Among only counties with a labor force of over 100,000, that makes Staten Island the second-heaviest concentration of law enforcement officers anywhere in the country, behind only Pinal County, Arizona, at 3.3 percent—and again, Pinal County is known for containing nine prisons, a mix of state, federal, and private facilities.
So what does this mean for the upcoming special election in NY-11? It means that despite the fact that this is a district that narrowly went for Obama (and by much bigger margins for Andrew Cuomo last year and Kirsten Gillibrand in 2012), nobody should get their hopes up too high about Democrats picking this seat up. This will probably play out as a highly localized election, more about de Blasio than about national politics, personified even more by having Donovan as the GOP standard-bearer. The one plus side here is that if Donovan wins, the optics will play very differently here than throughout the rest of the nation, i.e., electing the guy who failed to secure an indictment against the officers who killed Garner will be one more anchor on the GOP's efforts to show they've turned the corner with minority voters.