The rift between New York Mayor de Blasio and his city’s police department  is more than an internal spat. It has the potential to divide and harm the city and citizens, not to mention crashing the Mayor’s already self-jeopardized political career early in his term. Both sides if this dispute committed hostile acts that the other considers grievously disrespectful. Neither combatant appears ready to apologize.

De Blasio crossed what many of his department’s officers consider an uncrossable line when he suggested, in the immediate wake of the grand jury’s decision not to indict in the Eric Garner case, that his own bi-racial son was at risk of harm should he be apprehended by the NYPD. As I have written before, this was not, as the spinners would have it, just a case of a mayor being candid about genuine problem in community relations. This was a tacit endorsement of the “hands up” protests and their contention that Garner, Mike Brown and others were the victims of police racism, that police are killing, likely to kill, want to kill, black kids. It doesn’t matter that de Blasio may not have intended that implication: under the circumstances and in the context of events, this is what police officers interpreted his remarks to mean. He was siding against them. He was suggesting that the grand jury was wrong not to indict. He was suggesting not that some NYPD officers were racially biased, but that black children like his son “may not be [Translation: “are not“] safe from the very people they want to have faith in as their protectors.”

The police have responded with multiple demonstrations of anger and contempt for their boss. Most recently, there were boos and jeers when De Blasio spoke at a police graduation ceremony this week. Over a hundred officers symbolically turned their backs when the mayor spoke at the funeral of Officer Rafael Ramos, who was assassinated by a man who suggested that he was seeking vengeance for the deaths of Garner and Brown. That had followed the theme of an airplane-towed banner over the city that read,“Our backs have turned to you,”which in turn was inspired by the spontaneous gesture by officers present when de Blasio visited the hospital where the bodies of Officer Ramos and his partner lay.

The New York Times, which has been guilty of bolstering the “hands up” lie by carelessly linking the deaths of Brown and Garner as well as Trayvon Martin, none of which can be fairly blamed on racism based on available evidence, has come down squarely against the police, writing in an editorial:

“Officers often feel beleaguered, jerked around by supervisors and politicians, obligated to follow rules and policies that can be misguided, held responsible for their mistakes in ways that the public is not, exposed to frequent ridicule and hostility from the people they are sworn to serve. It has always been that way with cops.But none of those grievances can justify the snarling sense of victimhood that seems to be motivating the anti-de Blasio campaign — the belief that the department is never wrong, that it never needs redirection or reform, only reverence.”

This, like the editorial that contained it, is despicable, beginning with the Times embracing one of the lamest of all rationalizations to shrug off and trivialize the current vilification of police by a large and influential segment of society, egged on by comments and gestures by the President of the United States and the Attorney General—“It’s always been this way.”  Then the Times mocks “the snarling sense of victimhood”—can a sense “snarl”?—of police officers whose ranks were just thinned by murder based on a motive that the mayor’s statements encourage, and concocts a dishonest straw man explanation for what the protests signify, “the belief that the department is never wrong, that it never needs redirection or reform, only reverence.”

At a time when chants are calling for dead cops, when race-baiting on a national scale is making the assertion that America’s police forces are executing young black men, the police object to the fact that that their ultimate boss not only isn’t supporting them, but bolstering the unfair and dangerous campaign against them that has already claimed two lives.

That’s what the police are protesting.

That the police have a legitimate complaint, however, does not complete the ethical analysis. This is not a First Amendment speech issue, for on-the-job, public attacks on a supervisor is unambiguous insubordination. Insubordination in the workplace is not justified or made acceptable by the fact that it was provoked. If one’s boss acts like an asshole, calling the boss an asshole in the presence of other employees is a firing offense. So is this. The police know, however, that the mayor can’t fire hundreds of officers.

In other professions when management engages in blatant disrespect, disloyalty or unfair treatment, workers may strike, or walk out, or quit. But as Calvin Coolidge, as Massachusetts Lt. Governor, established in the Boston Police Strike of 1919, the incident put him on the path to be President, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.” De Blasio’s careless words put the NYPD in an impossible ethical conflict. If they remained silent as the Mayor impugned their integrity, fairness, competence and dedication, they would appear to be accepting his verdict. Walking off the job would be illegal; quitting en masse would similarly endanger the public and turn opinion against the police.

It isn’t without peril to openly show contempt for the mayor either. A government that airs its internal disputes and that appears dysfunctional and divided is not an effective of a trustworthy government. Yet the Times editors facile solution is pure fantasy:

But there is a way out of this cul-de-sac. It was stated at Officer Ramos’s funeral by an exemplary public servant — and stout de Blasio ally — Commissioner William Bratton.He put it beautifully: “The police, the people who are angry at the police, the people who support us but want us to be better, even a madman who assassinated two men because all he could see was two uniforms, even though they were so much more. We don’t see each other. If we can learn to see each other, to see that our cops are people like Officer Ramos and Officer Liu, to see that our communities are filled with people just like them, too. If we can learn to see each other, then when we see each other, we’ll heal. We’ll heal as a department. We’ll heal as a city. We’ll heal as a country.”

Sure. We’ll heal as a country, while a White House advisor, Al Sharpton, continues to encourage protests representing that Mike Brown was executed in cold blood, while pundits writing in the pages of the Times endorse the racially-divisive and bigoted position that any time a white officer is involved in the death of a black man, racial animus is presumptively part of the reason, while President Obama, the Congressional Black Caucus, Eric Holder and the Democratic party encourage the belief that opposition to the Obama administration and its policies is rooted in racism, and while the news media, like the Times, represents local police actions as emblematic of racial injustice in America, irrespective of the facts.

The department will heal, even though the mayor of the city it serves has stated that he worries that its members will harm his son because he’s black.

Under the circumstances, I reach the following conclusions:

1. The initial demonstration of disrespect by the police would be unethical out of context, but they were the best options among equally unacceptable responses. This was an ethics conflict, and every potential action breached an ethical principle.

2. These demonstrations, however, should not have continued after the point was made, by the police union and the actions of the officers, that de Blasio’s statements were inappropriate, unfair and damaging to the NYPD.

3. They should certainly stop now.

4. De Blasio was wrong to phrase his statement as he did, and he betrayed his own biases by doing so. He could have and should have alluded to issues of community trust and a review of police training, protocol and procedures, but he also had an obligation to point out in his initial remarks after the Garner grand jury decision that the vast majority of police are dedicated and brave public servants who should not be tarred as brutal and racist.

5. He should apologize. That is the only way out of this mess.

I don’t think he will.

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Source: New York Times