During Bill de Blasio’s run for mayor, he presented New York as a bitterly divided city, where the public couldn’t trust police whom he accused of racial profiling. Meanwhile, his pick for police commissioner, Bill Bratton, came in talking of how low police morale was.
A new Quinnipiac University poll seems to bear the mayor out. Though New Yorkers approve of the job police are doing by 50-42 percent — and a majority of African-Americans approve of broken-windows policing — support for the cops is at its lowest level in more than 14 years.
Fully 74 percent of those questioned, moreover, say police brutality is a serious problem. This is the highest since 2001. And at 48 percent, Bratton’s approval is one point lower than the percentage who find the Rev. Al Sharpton a “positive force” in the city.
The mayor and the commissioner would probably say the numbers reflect the reaction to the case of Eric Garner, who died on Staten Island while resisting arrest.
But while it’s true the non-stop criticism directed at cops since Garner’s death is undoubtedly reflected in the polling, the most striking thing about these numbers is that they’ve been heading in the wrong direction.
In other words, under the de Blasio-Bratton regime, public trust in the police isn’t going up. It’s going down. And so, as Bratton just admitted, is police morale.
When de Blasio took office, crime was at record lows and support for cops was at all-time highs. Now the numbers are moving the opposite way.
Then again, when you have a mayor talking up a polarized city, it’s likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.