Bill de Blasio vs. The Left
Before Bill de Blasio became mayor, the former public advocate got himself arrested during a protest outside of Long Island College Hospital. Nurses and activists had been rallying for weeks to stop the hospital’s closing. The staged handcuffing helped catapult de Blasio to the top of the polls in the 2013 mayoral election, which he eventually won.
The first Democratic mayor since David Dinkins was sworn in as progressive platitudes echoed through lower Manhattan on New Year’s day in 2014. The de Blasio era was the supposed organizing victory of a grassroots left that had long been fenced off from power at City Hall.
Five years later, the de Blasio administration is flashing its fangs at the left.
On his weekly radio “Ask the Mayor” segment last week, the Mayor was asked about policies that have come under scrutiny by housing and policing activists ironically on the political left — a sentiment which struck a nerve. What ensued was a breathless defense of his own policies, and, in his second and likely last term, really, his legacy.
The Mayor detailed supposed reforms around policing and raged that there wasn’t enough positive news coverage about them. He complained about not being credited with police training efforts or body cameras. He touted 100,000 less arrests in 2017 versus 2013, before he came into office, and went on to pat himself on the back for criticizing the police killing of a 66-year old Black woman, Deborah Danner.
The next day, the Mayor’s press secretary, Eric Phillips, responding to a story about the Mayor’s near meltdown, described critics of his boss, both on the right and left, as ‘fringe.’ Phillips, like the Mayor, argued that the advocacy point of view will always want more and never be satisfied, something which City Hall wants reporters take into consideration. In other words, journalists shouldn’t be tempted to give the activists point of view much legitimacy — a terrifying thought for those in power .
Phillips attempted to equate the Black Lives Matter left with the handful of voices from the conservative corners of the city (i.e. the New York Post, PBA president Pat Lynch) who say the mayor isn’t pro-cop enough — an obvious false equivalency — leaving the Mayor as some supposed balanced middle ground. While it can be infuriating for activists (and even family members whose loved hands have died at the hands of police) to see an out-of-town professional spinster dismiss them in a tweet, the ‘fringe’ swipe is in line with the arrogance and think skin that have come to characterize de Blasio administration.
In fact, perhaps more people can appreciate de Blasio — a one-time self-proclaimed champion for those outside of power — for who he really is: a transactional, career politician that sneers at those outside power and who predictably wants all the credit but none of the criticism.
But we should judge the Mayor on policy as well. As a longtime policing activist, I can say that under de Blasio policing in NYC has changed — but not for the better. What the Mayor argues are gains towards reform (training, body cameras) have in fact provided more resources to the police department but little evidence that they benefit everyday people.
“Neighborhood policing” has been a propaganda program for the police department that has produced little community participation. While de Blasio has insisted that he has brought new reforms to the NYPD, the canard of neighborhood, or community policing, has been used by the department time and time again. Neighborhood policing isn’t new. In fact, it’s biggest impact is that it was the talking point that helped the department net an additional 1,297 police officers to the headcount — an expansion of police power.
Training? While the Mayor promised “implicit bias” training for cops as far back as 2016, the department didn’t even begin until early this year. Implicit bias training, however, offers “no standards for its curriculum and no track record for assessing whether officers or departments successfully channel the training into their work.” The most damning indictment on notions of NYPD training may be recent video of Black mom Jazmine Headley and her child being manhandled by cops.
Body cameras? Body cameras offer potential police surveillance and don’t address the lack of political will to hold cops accountable. Remember that Eric Garner’s death was on film and yet the officer who killed him is free and on the taxpayer dime more than four years later.
What about the 100k less arrests — which the Mayor brought up twice during his radio appearance? Less arrests are great but de Blasio doesn’t deserve the credit. Activists, including myself, fought the influence of Broken Windows policing, a philosophy that called for aggressive enforcement against low-level “quality-of-life” offenses. We protested the Mayor early and often. We staged #swipeitforward actions to protest fare-beating arrests, one of the top arrest categories in the city, by swiping people in ourselves.
The voices on the left— which de Blasio wants journalists to ignore — forced change. Broken Windows became controversial, like stop and frisk (which are down under de Blasio but which auditors say are being undercounted) because grassroots activists and everyday people changed the conversation on policing by pointing out its racist impact on communities of color. The City Council eventually passed bills to nudge cops away from arrests that, as it turns out, were never necessary to keeping NYC safe. Prosecutors soon changed their tune on low-level prosecutions (even as de Blasio protested).
The political landscape changed despite the Mayor, not because of him.
There are also troubling developments in policing that both the mayor and his staffers are careful to avoid. The Mayor wants press to focus on his talking points and not, say, the rise “predictive policing”, which began in his first term. He’s probably not happy about continued reporting on the expansion of the police department’s secretive gang database. He’s certainly not thrilled at criticism from civil rights advocates about he and the police department’s reinterpretation of a decades-old law, NYS Civil Rights Law 50a, which serves to shield police misconduct from the public.
And let’s not forget that a former donor is testifying this month at a federal police corruption trial about the access he bought at City Hall. This is, after all, a mayor whose fundraising within the characters on the political right, like real estate developers, drew attention from both state and federal prosecutors.
To care about these issues, for de Blasio and his staffers, is ‘fringe.’
For some of us, de Blasio’s policing hand showed as far back as 2013. While it’s often been suggested that the Mayor changed after officers turned their backs on him in 2014, his appointment of Rudy Giuliani’s former police pitbull, Bill Bratton, said it all. Bratton was the first major cabinet pick by de Blasio which, for many, signaled that he’d be a mayor amenable to the tough on crime crowd and the wealthy sections of the city that appreciate living in a city where the police are constantly on the necks of poor communities of color.
Despite mainstream reporting and de Blasio’s supporters amongst liberal Democrats, the left never came to City Hall — the left had been duped. The comments from Phillips say it all. This administration sees those who want social justice as ‘fringe,’ as outside of the mayor’s agenda.
So then perhaps question now isn’t why de Blasio is dismissing the left, it’s why the left hasn’t by now completely dismissed de Blasio.
