A City of Mourning and Demonized Police

A City of Mourning and Demonized Police

Shunned by cops, allied with Al Sharpton, incensed by criticism: New York’s mayor begins his second year.

By Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal

As demonstrations over the grand-jury decisions in Ferguson, Mo., and New York’s Staten Island gathered momentum, Smith College President Kathleen McCartney felt herself obliged on Dec. 9 to issue a campus-wide apology. Her offense? Having said, in a message of support for the protests, that “all lives matter”—for which she became a target of enraged rebukes charging her with insensitivity and with minimizing the concerns of blacks.

What President McCartney’s instant apology said about the moral spine and leadership on the nation’s campuses today needs no spelling out. It wouldn’t be long, however, before the impact of two nonblack lives snuffed out with murderous deliberation would come blasting into the continuing carnival of staged “die-ins,” blocked highways and chanting marchers, including the contingent shouting “What do we want? Dead cops.”

Nothing more instantly transformed the atmosphere in New York than the Dec. 20 killing of police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, shot as they sat in their police car. It broke the hearts of New Yorkers, it demolished whatever shard of public sympathy was left for the marches and denunciations of the police. The murders had, in addition, caused a glaring light to be cast on the mayor of New York, whose central campaign theme when running for the office had been devoted almost exclusively to the evils, the racial bias, in the stop-and-frisk tactic practiced by the police.

Once in office, Bill de Blasio made clear his view of the police as a power that required watching and re-education. To which end he summoned Al Sharpton , the longtime race hustler whose lifetime career pressing fraudulent bias claims, inciting racial conflagrations, was apparently no deterrent to Mayor de Blasio, who described Mr. Sharpton as the nation’s foremost civil-rights leader. The general attitudes emanating from the de Blasio administration were, the police concluded, distinctly unsupportive.

The most important cause of all for that glaring light, of course, was the fact that the two police officers had been killed by an assassin inspired by the antipolice fervor of the demonstrators and by the image of police as a major danger to young black men.

The killer had attended one of the rallies. He had also made certain that there would be no mystery about his motive. He had posted online an explicit declaration of his aim to kill the police, and of the reason: “They Take 1 Of Ours...... Let’s Take 2 of Theirs #ShootThePolice.”

This didn’t prevent immediate efforts on the part of the press sympathetic to the protests, and to the mayor, to dismiss the murders of the police officers as one more case of mental disturbance. The murders had nothing to do, really, with any response to the cases of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York—or, more to the point, with any incitement by the nonstop flow of accusations by demonstrators casting the police as racists and killers.

Much like an echo of the politically driven instinct to play down acts of terrorism as the product of mental illness, family dysfunction and life’s disappointments, regular media portraits of the murderer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, ascribed his act to a turbulent personal life and mental illness.

The idea that deranged individuals with, say, a history of disturbed relationships and a tendency to violence shouldn’t be seen as genuine representatives of a cause, an ideology, is decidedly odd if not itself a kind of deranged thinking. When the cause itself is a grab bag of pathologies, it isn’t surprising that it attracts the disturbed.

More remarkable than anything, perhaps, in the aftermath of the murder of the two police officers, has been the effort to portray Mayor de Blasio as a martyr of sorts—the victim of New York City police officers, who had unfairly decided that Mr. de Blasio thought they were prone to mistreating black citizens and were in need of fundamental reform. Still, nobody paying attention to Mayor de Blasio’s pronouncements would have failed to come away with precisely that perception of his attitudes—not least his very public announcement last month that he had to “train” his biracial teenage son about the “dangers” posed to him by police officers.

The mayor had, in addition, staunchly defended his hiring of Mr. Sharpton’s longtime aide, Rachel Noerdlinger, to serve as chief of staff to his wife, Chirlane McCray, despite the fact that Ms. Noerdlinger had concealed her relationship with a live-in boyfriend—a convicted killer with a habit of posting his police-bashing tirades online. In November, the mayor, furious at eventually having to let this chosen hire go—she had other problems—accused her critics of McCarthyism.

Numbers of police officers have, as a result, chosen to turn their backs to this mayor at public events, including the ones where he was shown on an outdoor video screen, speaking at the funerals of their fellow officers. The amount of righteous hand-wringing inspired by this silent, civilized protest has been remarkable. Noteworthy too, for having been churned out by the same progressive-liberal quarters of the media that were enraptured by the demonstrators—hordes that swarmed the streets of New York, determined that there should be no lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, no Christmas shopping (they invaded five department stores), no traveling on the city’s highways.

It took scarcely more than two days of Police Commissioner William Bratton’s managed permissiveness for the protesters—intoxicated by their media-accorded status on television and in opinion pieces lauding their peacefulness—to become violent. On Dec. 13, as thousands of protesters blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, two police officers were beaten and hospitalized as they tried to stop protesters from heaving a garbage can on police officers below the roadway.

But with a police demonstration involving a silent turning of backs, the media cheering section that had embraced demonstrators bent on shutting down the city became impassioned defenders of propriety. New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick solemnly accused the police who turned their backs on the mayor at the Dec. 27 funeral of Officer Ramos of hijacking an occasion for mourning.

Officer Liu’s funeral on Sunday was, like the Ramos funeral, very nearly unbearable both for the depth of grief on display and for its eloquence. No one who heard her will soon forget the words of tribute spoken by Pei Xia Chen, Officer Liu’s widow, in honor of her husband, or the anguish in them.

The days pass, the memories of these events will grow dim, but certain things endure, among them the realization that tens of thousands came to New York to march for justice, to charge the police, the system, with crimes against minorities.

When it was all over, there were two dead police officers and a grieving city.

On Monday at a news conference, a seething Mayor de Blasio rebuked police officers for turning their backs to him, calling it a “political action”—the implication being, as his allies in the media have been suggesting, that the officers were just using the occasions to express resentment over union contract negotiations. The remarks, made as he begins his second year in office, say everything about how little Mr. de Blasio knows about the city of which he is the mayor.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.