No love lost between police unions, mayors

On Saturday, a man killed two police officers, then himself, in Brooklyn, New York, after shooting his ex-girlfriend in Baltimore. Against a background of protests focused on the use of lethal force by police, the NYPD deaths became national news with the discovery of earlier boasts from the murderer: "I'm Putting Wings on Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours...... Let's Take 2 of Theirs. #ShootThePolice #RIPErivGardner [sic] #RIPMikeBrown."

At a press conference Monday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and his police chief, Bill Bratton, did nothing to refute the killer's framing of events: that he had shot officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos to avenge the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. De Blasio asked the public to stop demonstrating, at least temporarily, and to focus instead on mourning.

It was a conciliatory gesture in a moment of extreme tension between city hall and the local police union. On Saturday, at the hospital where Liu and Ramos were pronounced dead, a hallway full of officers turned their backs on the mayor — as did Patrick Lynch, head of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (PBA), which represents rank-and-file cops, and Ed Mullins, president of the sergeants' union. The mayor has "the blood of these two officers [on his] hands," Mullins said. This blood, Lynch echoed, "starts on the steps of City Hall."

Law enforcement is defined by hierarchy and adherence to the chain of command, but municipal officers' unions have often defied their commanders in chief — police commissioners and mayors — and not only during contract negotiations. “Officers as officers have a chain of command and report to their superiors, but the union is quite outside of that,” said Paul Lewis, a political science professor at Arizona State University.

New York’s PBA has spared no criticism of de Blasio since Dec. 3, when a grand jury failed to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo in the choking death of African-American Eric Garner — about a week after a similar non-indictment in Ferguson, Mo., and despite calls by the nation’s largest union confederation, the AFL-CIO, for police accountability. On Dec. 4, Lynch said his union had been "thrown under the bus" by the mayor, who mentioned in a speech that he’d spoken with his mixed-race son about encounters with police following Garner's death. Lynch, a tough-talking, longtime advocate for the blue line, called Garner's death tragic, but added, "It's also a tragedy for this police officer who has to live with that death." 

The union boss has since accused de Blasio of "running a fucking revolution" and encouraged PBA members to sign "Don't Insult My Sacrifice" pledges that tell the mayor and New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who has championed police reform, to "refrain from attending my funeral in the event that I am killed in the line of duty." [PDF] (A similar pledge in 1997 was not endorsed by the PBA.) Lynch has also demanded that every public commemoration of Garner pay equal homage to fallen police officers and accused city leadership of privileging the rights of protesters while "scapegoat[ing cops] for centuries of racial issues." (A PBA spokesperson declined to offer comment until after the funerals of Liu and Ramos.)