The Real Reason New York Police Unions Are Waffling on Stop-and-Frisk

This month leaders of New York City's police unions have changed the debate over stop-and-frisk: After promising for months they'd block Mayor Bill de Blasio's attempt to drop the city's appeal of a critical stop-and-frisk ruling, Captains Endowment Association president Roy Richter told Capital New York last week that he "might" consider dropping the appeal if the de Blasio administration played ball on contract negotiations.

This is indeed a huge change. Last we discussed the NYPD and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, now 10 weeks into Michael Bloomberg's old job, the two parties were at an impasse. De Blasio, who campaigned on reforming stop-and-frisk's racial disparities, announced in January that he planned to drop Bloomberg's appeal of a federal ruling requiring the city to drastically overhaul the stop-and-frisk program. In turn, several of the unions representing NYPD sworn officers promised to take up the appeal themselves. Additionally, some members of the NYPD seemingly expressed their displeasure with the new mayor by leaking sensitive info—the circumstances of Philip Seymour Hoffman's death, de Blasio's late night phone call to a precinct that had arrested one of his political allies—to New York media.