We certainly understand why Mayor Bill de Blasio flew back to the city amid his weeklong vacation to attend the ceremony honoring slain NYPD Detective Miosotis Familia — but not why he had to commandeer a $3 million NYPD counterterrorism plane for the trip.
Skipping the street-renaming event would’ve been awkward. After all, de Blasio took a ton of flak for leaving town the day after Familia was shot and killed in the Bronx last summer — flying off to Germany to boost his international progressive profile with a speech to a lefty Hamburg rally.
Yet he doesn’t look much better now, having opted to spend thousands of taxpayer dollars on his round-trip air taxi.
Police sources noted that flying the mayor anywhere in the plane, a Cessna 208 Caravan, is “unusual” and “excessive” — especially since this was an international flight. The city normally uses the plane for high-tech anti-terror exercises, like sniffing out dirty bomb threats, those sources said.
Not that this is de Blasio’s first abuse of “NYPD Air”: He was caught taking a record-setting 14 NYPD helicopter rides in 2016 — sometimes just to get from meeting to meeting. All without much concern for his carbon footprint, either.
But this latest perk-play is worse. He didn’t just use an NYPD plane so he could belatedly show respect for the NYPD’s Familia: He used an anti-terror plane.
Remember, forces in Washington are regularly looking to slash federal anti-terror funding for the city. Time and again, city leaders have had to rally to preserve that cash. Now the critics can point to the mayor’s self-serving use of anti-terror resources.
That’s Bill de Blasio: His needs always come first, far ahead of the interests of New York and its people.