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NY Times, August 7 2014
A Healing That Wasn’t: Liberal Activists and the Police Assail City Hall
After Chokehold Death, de Blasio Seeks a Tricky Balance
By NIKITA STEWART and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Confronting the first civil rights test of his administration, Mayor
Bill de Blasio is struggling to take command of a controversy over the
police and race that has pitted his longtime liberal supporters against
the police department he now depends on to keep the peace.
Mr. de Blasio had hoped for a healing moment last Thursday at City Hall,
gathering police officials, clergy members and social activists to show
that New Yorkers could unite after a black Staten Island man’s death in
police custody. But the event quickly turned into a spectacle.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, unaware he would be asked to share the stage with
William J. Bratton, the police commissioner, delivered a provocative
attack on law enforcement as Mr. Bratton sat stone-faced, inches away.
With Mr. Sharpton to his left and Mr. Bratton to his right, Mr. de
Blasio sounded more moderator than mayor, trying to mollify both.
It hasn’t worked. By Wednesday, as police unions threatened a slowdown,
Mr. Sharpton and scores of liberal activists were making plans to
ratchet up pressure on City Hall, hoping to force an end to the
so-called broken-windows approach to policing — cracking down on little
crimes to deter bigger ones — that Mr. Bratton pioneered and that Mr. de
Blasio has so far defended. “We really need to step up on this,” Mr.
Sharpton told the group, recommending a march this month across the
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
Now, Mr. de Blasio is turning to his closest advisers, including the
strategists who guided his mayoral campaign and crystallized his
position against stop-and-frisk tactics, to help him better communicate
his message.
“We don’t want to give the wrong answer,” said Rachel Noerdlinger, who
like other City Hall aides interviewed for this article said the mayor
was carefully trying to articulate a path toward improved relations
between the police and the community. “We want to make sure that
whatever reform is made is fair and here to stay.”
The issue is an important and delicate one for Mr. de Blasio, not least
because of the promises he made during last year’s mayoral race, when he
burst into the political arena as a feisty critic of aggressive policing
and made his teenage biracial son a symbol of his opposition to the
stop-and-frisk tactic.
As mayor, Mr. de Blasio has had to muffle his inner advocate, aware that
critics will pounce on any suggestion that he is undermining law
enforcement. But to many of the reformers who once marched beside Mr. de
Blasio, the mayor’s cautious, middle-ground approach — after the death
of Eric Garner last month in what appeared on a video to be an illegal
police chokehold — has been interpreted as weak.
“Now is not the time to talk about nuance on broken windows after a
coroner has ruled that a man has been murdered on the street in broad
daylight,” said Christina Greer, who teaches political science at
Fordham University. “People don’t want to hear that right now.”
Mr. Sharpton, who declined to endorse a black candidate, William C.
Thompson Jr., over Mr. de Blasio in last year’s Democratic primary, said
in an interview that he was now hearing from disgruntled ministers and
community leaders who have questioned the mayor’s commitment.
“What’s he going to do?” is the question that Mr. Sharpton said he heard
the most.
As activists fret, officers grumble, with many at Police Headquarters
surprised to see Mr. Sharpton, at last week’s round table, accorded a
position of prominence equal to Mr. Bratton’s. “We protect Al Sharpton’s
right to have his opinion, but his opinion should not be elevated,”
Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association,
said on NY1 on Wednesday night.
Mr. de Blasio’s aides said the external pressure was exactly why the
mayor had remained circumspect on the Garner episode, saying he did not
wish to be baited by either side. “We’re focused on the long game and
that means real, lasting change,” said Peter Ragone, a senior adviser.
“That’s going to take more than one or two news cycles.”
The mayor’s public remarks have echoed that thought. “We’re on a much
bigger track here. We have bigger work to do,” Mr. de Blasio said this
week, when asked if he was worried about the state of police-community
relations in the city. “I don’t get lost at any moment in the public
debate. And I don’t let any one voice pull me away from my vision.”
That vision remains vague, leaving Mr. de Blasio’s aides fending off
critics who fear he will not come through with a forceful reworking of
the Police Department’s approach.
“Everybody is acting like he’s unbendable,” said Ms. Noerdlinger, who
worked for Mr. Sharpton before she joined City Hall.
Behind the scenes, however, mayoral aides have watched some of their
efforts go awry.
Mr. Sharpton said he was initially told that last week’s City Hall event
would be a private gathering with Staten Island community members. He
arrived to discover that Mr. Bratton — and a phalanx of television
cameras — would be in the room, too.
With the public watching, Mr. Sharpton said he felt compelled to deliver
his full-throated critique of the Police Department. The event’s key
image — Mr. Bratton, Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Sharpton sitting beside one
another — was seized on by administration critics and showed up on the
cover of the next day’s New York Post, with the headline “Who’s the Boss!”
The question of who was in charge arose in a different form earlier,
when Mr. de Blasio was in Italy for the first week after Mr. Garner’s
death. In the mayor’s absence, Mr. Bratton became the voice for the
administration, irking some activists.
“The response from the commissioner is that we need more training,” said
Javier Valdez, an advocate for immigrants. “Training without
accountability doesn’t go far.” Mr. Valdez recalled how Mr. de Blasio’s
aides reached out after Mr. Garner’s death. “They wanted us to know they
were on top of it,” he said.
But as advocates began to intensify their calls for an end to the
broken-windows strategy, those conversations grew more adversarial, if
still respectful.
“To their credit, they have not tried to stop it,” Mr. Valdez said of
the administration. “They have tried to see what the best way forward
is.” He added: “We’re not there yet. We feel that broken windows needs
to change drastically and the commissioner and the mayor feel a
different way.”
Mr. de Blasio’s team hopes to remind New Yorkers of the mayor’s other
efforts toward racial equity, like settling a lawsuit from the Central
Park Five and installing as police commissioner Mr. Bratton, who has
agreed to continue reducing stops and frisks.
This week, however, the mayor’s profile in the city has been low. He
decamped to Washington on Tuesday for a White House dinner with African
heads of state — after sending his regrets that he could not visit local
police precincts for the National Night Out Against Crime, which mayors
typically attend each year.
On Wednesday, the mayor spent his morning in Washington meeting with the
federal housing secretary. He had no question-and-answer session planned
for his Thursday schedule.
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