The New York City Police Department is worried that New Yorkers, including children of minorities, don’t have enough respect for the Police. What the department is probably not aware of is the message is coming across as the marching orders for the establishment of a Police City.
Read this out loud: "We have to teach our children, our sons and our daughters, no matter what they look like, to respect New York City police officers, teach them to comply with New York City police officers even if they think it's unjust."
That's the President of the NYPD union, cited in many news sites including CBS and the Post, and he's talking not to some angry, concerned dad in The Bronx, but to all of us. Especially to the city's top officer, Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Watching the full video is very hard, because PBA president Pat Lynch comes across as a bully, to be completely honest. He’s also bossing around the city Mayor, which is a bit scary coming from a man who represents (though he’s far from commanding) the largest civil armed force in the city.
Also worrying is his tome at the 4:21 mark, when he says "We need to teach our children and everyone that you cannot resist arrest. Even if you believe the arrest is unjust."
In his speech, Lynch makes at least a couple very good points: It’s impossible for a cop to walk away when someone is resisting arrest. Resisting arrest, as oxymoronic as it sounds, is a crime. Also, policing the real world of New York City streets cannot be done with a police department that mimics Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen’s. That second point is, also, quite obvious. So Lynch appears condescending.
Full disclosure: I have never met Lynch, I’ve only seen a few of his speeches.
So he has a good point. Also, his condolences to Eric Garner’s family seemed honest, even heart-felt.
But what his speech lacks is the mirror image of what Lynch is demanding from Gracie Mansion: a little empathy.
Lynch failed to mention the reasons why even De Blasio must speak with his biracial son and remind him to be fearful of the Police.
I grew up in Bogota, Colombia. In the late 80s and 90s, during the Cartel Wars, the Police (including the Secret Police, the DAS, which was dissolved in 2011 after years of having collected intelligence about opposition figures, journalists, union leaders, lawmakers and high court justices) took sides on-and-off, mostly siding with the Cali Cartel and against Pablo Escobar.
During college, the stories that mentioned the Police usually involved a kidnapped relative or friend, the back of a Police car, a handover to the real criminals. When I left almost 10 years ago to come to New York I was still afraid of the Police.
So one of my points has to be that when I arrived here almost 10 years ago, noticing how the NYPD operated, how I felt in the vicinity of the Police, I was relieved. The police here are not close to being the worse around. They are very likely among the best in large cities in the Americas. (Though the only real competition is Canada, or maybe Costa Rica. Otherwise, from Mexico to Chile, there’s no one you want to be compared to. But I digress.)
Lynch says, correctly, it is the criminals we should all fear, not the Police. If, again, the police were Armisen and Brownstein, well…
But they’re not. They seem poorly trained, which is evidenced in the many instances of excessive use of force that are recorded too often. So they have to do something.
De Blasio announced a retraining program in which a key word is “de-escalate”.
So listen up, NYPD. The citizens you protect are asking you to do a simple thing: de-escalate.
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