How the NYPD Came to See Itself As Different From Those It Protects
What are Pat Lynch and his policemen really after? The protests that began theatrically, in rhetoric and gesture — Lynch, the head of New York’s Patrolman's Benevolent Association, roaring that “blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor” after the murders of officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, a phalanx of cops turning their backs on the mayor at their funerals — have escalated into a work stoppage so comprehensive that it is hard to find a precedent. Across all precincts, while denying explicit coordination, the police seem to have simply decided to stop enforcing minor crimes, a work stoppage whose cynicism has alarmed even the New York Post. It is hard, too, to find a point; none has been made explicit. Perhaps this is some shrewd tactical play for a better contract or for more control over officer discipline, but the sense of grievance and betrayal voiced by union officials and cops in the city and around the country seems to run deeper than that. If this is an emotional episode and not a tactical one, then the better question to ask is probably not what the policemen are after but what they are dwelling on. More and more, that seems to be their own alienation, and difference.
Yesterday morning, for instance, a New York Post reporter paid a visit to the Rockland County home of Andrew Dossi, one of the police officers injured in a shoot-out at a Chinese restaurant in the Bronx. Mayor de Blasio had made a hospital sympathy call to Dossi, and the Post wanted to know what the encounter had been like. “He wasn’t too happy about the Mayor’s visit,” Dossi’s father Joseph recounted, which almost surely was what the reporter had been hoping for. More striking was the way Dossi described his son’s service. “He [Dossi] deals with some crappy people every day and getting no support [from the mayor], come on. These are the guys in the trenches dealing with anything and everything.”
Sand off the rough edges, develop Dossi’s military metaphor a little more, and you’ve got something very close to the essay the Post columnist Michael Goodwin wrote a week earlier: “NYPD and the military,” the headline ran, “our angels in a time of danger and cynicism.” In the depressing, monthlong conflict between City Hall and the cops — escalated over the past two weeks by what seems to be an ongoing work stoppage — this line has been echoed by the officers’ spokesmen and their supporters, that the cops are different from those they police, that they are agents of good. One of the stranger grievances that is given a central place in the stories of rising police animosity toward de Blasio is the outrage that Bratton, the police commissioner, was compelled by the mayor to participate in a panel on police-community relations with Al Sharpton — as if meeting with political figures with whom you disagree weren’t the kind of thing that public officials had to do as a matter of course, as if Sharpton were somehow intolerably lesser. Lynch seemed to emphasize this kind of difference when addressing a graduating class of Police Academy cadets just before Christmas, when he implored them to work to connect with the community “even if they don’t speak like you.” Which was an interesting thing to tell a graduating class that hailed from 51 separate countries and spoke 59 languages. What was the nature of this difference between cadets and their communities supposed to be, anyway?
What the city’s police have done in this work stoppage is take it upon themselves to rebalance public safety and police safety — to protect the public a little bit less, at the margins, in order to protect themselves a little bit more. The language of union officials has sometimes suggested that the cops see the city right now as an enemy camp: “We’re being very cautious — we don’t want to enrage the public,” one told the New York Times. And yet, it isn’t as if police are getting murdered left and right: As Radley Balko at the Washington Post has documented, the proportion of police murders per capita was at its lowest rate in a century in 2013, and “you’re more likely to be murdered simply by living in about half of the largest cities in America than you are while working as a police officer.” Ismaiiyl Brinsley increasingly seems to be a lone, deranged maniac rather than part of some cascading threat to cops. It wasn’t too long ago, of course, that New York cops were in much more danger than this. But to suggest that a single attack means that police are suddenly so vulnerable is to summon ghosts. It is to turn back time.
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