A City on the Brink

[Valin]

City Journal:

Anti-cop attitudes among the city’s progressive elites created the context for this weekend’s atrocity.

Matthew Hennessey

Dec. 21 2014

 

New York City’s anti-cop activists are scrambling for cover now that two NYPD officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, have been slain in cold blood on a Brooklyn street by a suspected gang member seeking revenge for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. For the last several weeks, Gotham has been the scene of nightly, inflammatory protests against the NYPD. An assortment of self-proclaimed social-justice activists have disrupted traffic, assaulted officers, and demanded an end to Broken Windows policing. The city’s progressive elites, including Mayor Bill de Blasio and city council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, have accommodated the protestors—offering them aid and comfort in the media, entertaining their wilder claims, and standing silent as they defamed the NYPD as racist killers.

 

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An institution can absorb only so much slander. Are the cops overly sensitive to criticism? If so, they have good reason: like officers Liu and Ramos, they put their lives on the line every day. They go to work every morning knowing that this could be the day they don’t come home. Not many of us can say that we understand what that feels like. Certainly, few of the angry undergraduates and middle-class trustafarians shutting down freeways and lying down in the middle of Grand Central know anything about it.

 

Bill de Blasio’s New York is an upside-down world, where a police force responsible for transforming a crime-plagued metropolis into the safest big city in America can be openly defamed—and where two more NYPD families will spend Christmas in mourning.

[Valin]

[nickydog]

 

The problem is, the people who should see this didn't.

[Valin]

De Blasio’s arrogance puts cops in cross hairs
Michael Goodwin
December 22, 2014

After I once criticized President Obama for appearing to abandon Israel by being rude to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, my mailbag quickly overflowed with anti-Semitic attacks. The writers proudly signed their names to the kind of vile slurs on Jews usually whispered in private.

The president bore some responsibility for that tide of sludge. Not that Obama was guilty of personal anti-Semitism, but his behavior was a whistle the anti-Semitic dogs heard loud and clear. Unintentionally, he gave them license to come out of hiding.

So it is with Mayor Bill de Blasio and the cop-haters. There is no way he wanted to see NYPD officers murdered, and his distress is surely genuine. But he is accountable nonetheless.

“Once a bullet leaves a gun, it has no friends,” the late Sen. Pat Moynihan once said. That is the nature of power, too. Those who have it must take extra care to be precise in their words and actions, lest they unleash the dogs of hell.

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