The latest example came Monday morning at a Police Academy graduation ceremony for 884 new officers, where de Blasio was heckled and booed. When he talked about the officers facing "problems [they] don't create," someone in the audience called back: "You created them!" This followed the mass back-turning by scores of officers when the mayor spoke on Saturday at the funeral of Officer Rafael Ramos; the virtual back-turning the day before by an airplane-towed banner (“Our backs have turned to you”), and the original spiteful gesture by officers on the night Mr. de Blasio visited the hospital where Officer Ramos and his partner, Wenjian Liu, lay dead. But if this really is the new standard at City Hall, why is New York still waiting for the apology the city really needs — from the mayor, for his public insinuations that the NYPD is a racist force which needs to be retrained to respect black life? In doing so, they also turned their backs on Mr. Ramos’s widow and her two young sons, and others in that grief-struck family.
– New York City cops have literally turned their backs on Mayor de Blasio and jeered him in public, and, as the New York Post reports, they now seem to be engaging in a "virtual work stoppage" in terms of arrests. Some critics, however, say it's the NYPD that's in the wrong. At Gawker today, Andy Cush delivers this scathing assessment: The department "is too childish and entitled to deserve its privileged status, and too aggrieved and resentful to be called 'New York's Finest.' The New York Police Department is an embarrassment to the city of New York." De Blasio's main offense in the eyes of the NYPD came after the non-indictment in the Eric Garner case, when he said that his son needs to be especially careful around police because he's black. After the police union blamed the mayor for the subsequent murder of two officers, the New York Times made the case that rank-and-file officers deserve better from their union reps. "Mr. de Blasio isn’t going to say it, but somebody has to: With these acts of passive-aggressive contempt and self-pity, many New York police officers, led by their union, are squandering the department’s credibility, defacing its reputation, shredding its hard-earned respect," it says in an editorial. "They have taken the most grave and solemn of civic moments—a funeral of a fallen colleague—and hijacked it for their own petty look-at-us gesture." On the flip side, a New York Post editorial says de Blasio still owes the city an apology for "his public insinuations that the NYPD is a racist force." The mayor was meeting today with leaders of the five police unions to try to calm things down.