On Tuesday night, as Mayor Bill de Blasio went on CNN to lie to Chris Cuomo that all was “calm” in New York, the exhausted men and women of the NYPD were being bruised and battered for the fourth night by criminals running amok under the cover of George Floyd protests.
“It’s been a good night,” de Blasio said.
As he spoke, the reality on the streets was revealed in a video going viral on Twitter of a “looting party” in Soho, with hundreds of revelers milling around looted stores and dancing on cars.
At the same time, over on Fox News, NYPD Sergeants Benevolent Association chief Ed Mullins was making an extraordinary plea for the President Trump to intervene to rescue a mighty police force that has been hobbled and abandoned by its political masters.
“The NYPD is losing the City of New York and we have no leadership in the City of New York,” Mullins said.
His officers have been pelted with bricks, rocks and Molotov cocktails and their vehicles have been set alight. They have been run over by speeding cars, bashed by looters and forced to run from one incident to another without being allowed to deploy anti-riot apparatus, such as pepper-ball guns and mounted horses.
For all that, de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo still criticize the NYPD for using excessive force and refuse to call out the National Guard.
And even with the superhuman effort of the NYPD, as fast as they arrest looters and rioters, the revolving door of Cuomo’s new no-bail laws has suspects back on the streets.
“Our hands are being tied,” said Mullins. “We are being told to stand down. This is the far left’s version of ‘broken windows’ … We have a city that’s being destroyed. The public that lives there is in fear for their lives.”
Then he appealed directly to the commander in chief: “If President Trump is watching this … please, please immediately send federal personnel to New York City and monitor what is going on.”
Mullins is a tough, resilient cop, like the Finest he represents. So you know he must be desperate to resort to pleading for help on TV.
Around the nation we are seeing police at the breaking point. They are showing restraint in the face of insane abuse. Some officers even have taken the knee in solidarity with peaceful protesters.
Not that they get any credit for the gesture.
Thanks to the hysteria being stoked by the media and Democrats hoping for electoral advantage, police are being killed and injured and abused to avenge the death of a man half a country away.
No one has defended the Minneapolis cop who kept his knee pressed into Floyd’s neck until he stopped breathing. Everyone is appalled. Fired cop Derek Chauvin is in jail charged with murder. Three colleagues were charged Wednesday as accomplices.
Any dysfunction in Minneapolis’ undermined and undermanned police force could be blamed on the city’s liberal Democratic permanent political class.
It has nothing to do with the NYPD.
The NYPD is majority nonwhite, anyway, so it makes no sense to cast the rank-and-file as white supremacists.
Nor is there a crisis of black-deaths-by-cop to justify the hysteria. In fact, the number of fatal police shootings of unarmed black men across the country has plummeted, from 38 in 2015 to nine last year, according to a Washington Post database.
The truth is that the police are just “pawns” in a political game, as Mullins said in a letter to his troops this week.
Just like the #MeToo mantra of “Believe All Women,” “Black Lives Matter” is a ruse for leveraging power. Only certain women and some black lives matter, and only if they fit the latest narrative of oppression being crafted to divide America and create chaos.
Joe Biden is all in on this game.
The same day that Mullins was begging for help from the president, Biden went to Philadelphia and waxed lyrical for 20 minutes about “bad police” and systemic racism. He’s attending Floyd’s funeral and asking for donations off Floyd’s name.
But in all the verbiage, Biden never mentioned David Dorn, an upstanding 77-year-old retired police captain who was shot dead that very morning protecting a store from looters in St. Louis.
Dorn was black. Doesn’t his life matter?
Nor did Biden mention another black cop, Dave Patrick Underwood, the first victim of the riots. The 53-year-old Federal Protective Service officer was assassinated in a drive-by shooting as he stood guard Friday outside a federal building in Oakland. He was a family man who loved cars and baseball.
We hardly heard about his death. Doesn’t his black life matter?
No, the black lives of Dorn and Underwood don’t matter as much as the black life of Floyd because they are not useful in the left’s ideological war against law and order.
Radicals like de Blasio who become mayors are hellbent on disempowering police forces under their control.
Soon enough they will succeed in driving away good people from a thankless vocation so that the only police left will be incompetents and sadists.
Betraying a legacy of 1960s
The best way to understand how nihilistic and ineffectual the race riots of today are is to compare them with Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil-rights movement.
My late father, Frank Devine, was a young reporter in New York at the time, and my sisters and I grew up hearing stories of what he described as the greatest assignment of his life.
He was in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, for King’s confrontation with Police Chief Eugene “Bull” Connor.
This was what Devine wrote 20 years later: “A cynical and egotistical man, Connor was part of a lame-duck city administration with only a few weeks of its term to run. The local black community believed it could negotiate with the incoming administration for an end to Birmingham’s iniquitous Jim Crow regulations and customs.
“King came to town, however, and persuaded Birmingham’s blacks to take to the street in nonviolent protest against segregation — in effect, to step up the pressure in a battle a number of local blacks felt they had already won.
“Was King deliberately seeking to provoke white extremists, in particular the impulsive and theatrical Connor? Many observers thought so.
“In any case, Connor responded with a flourish. His high-pressure hoses knocking down well-dressed black men and women and his snarling police dogs menacing them are among the most enduring images of the ’60s.
“I think Connor knew he was being finessed, but the realization just made him more ornery. He took to holding impromptu press conferences each afternoon in Kelly Ingram Park, on the edge of Birmingham’s downtown black quarter, barking out racist nonsense in a perverse parody of redneck bigotry …
“These black men and women of Birmingham came to each frightening encounter with firehoses and dogs in a spirit of … gift-bearing. That is something hard to explain in these less-giving ’80s, but, as a young reporter in the early ’60s, it seemed to me that black Americans were not so much demanding rights as offering their country, in proof of their trust in it, a gift of a rich and special culture. In effect, they were saying: Until now our lives have been hidden from you. But look at how much we have to offer.”
Today’s riots betray that legacy.