Justice
The Cops vs. the Mayor: Bill de Blasio's Big Headache
Can the liberal NYC mayor mend fences with increasingly hostile police leadership just as he needs the force to handle protests against bad policing?
Things have been tense between Bill de Blasio and the union that represents the city’s police officers almost since the minute the mayor took office a year ago. He was elected, after all, on a platform of ending stop-and-frisk policing in order to improve community relations with the men and women in blue—an agenda that explicitly rebuked the NYPD’s status quo.
Since de Blasio was sworn in, things have only gotten more uncomfortable. A few days ago, the situation reached an ugly new low when the union called for its members to sign a pledge asking that the mayor not attend their funerals should they be killed in the line of duty.