The Secret Files: Bill Deblasio, The NYPD, and the Broken Promises of Police Reform: Bill De Blasio, The NYPD, and The Broken Promises of Police Reform

Kingston Imperial

The Secret Files: Bill de Blasio, The NYPD, And The Broken Promises Of Police Reform Copyright © 2022 by Michael Hayes

This work is based on allegations raised in court documents, trial transcripts, secret recordings, interviews, and other law enforcement material. Individuals who are mentioned in connection to certain acts of alleged misconduct but who have not been charged with or convicted of those alleged acts, are of course entitled to a presumption of innocence. Though the author’s words are not written to represent an exact transcript of events, in all instances, the essence of dialogue is accurate.

Kingston Imperial is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone. The author in no way represents Kingston Imperial and the views expressed in this book are solely those of the author.

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— For Ryan, my steadfast champion.

CONTENTS

1. The assassination of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos

2. Police Unions and a History of Tension

3. Bill de Blasio and a New Era of Broken Windows Policing

4. Not a big deal. We were effecting a lawful arrest: the police killing of Eric Garner

5. They killed Marley!: the police killing of Bronx teenager Ramarley Graham

6. Who was Officer Daniel Pantaleo?: the fight over Civil Rights Law 50-a

7. He’s stabbing me! Shoot him!": the police killing of Mohamed Bah

8. Three shots in East New York: the police killing of Delrawn Small

9. A legal saga for families: the trials of Ramarley Graham, Mohamed Bah and Delrawn Small’s killers

10. Anything besides an empty hand there, I’m shooting him.: How the cops who killed Miguel Richards were protected

11. The NYPD files stashed at the library: two civil rights advocates and thousands of secret police disciplinary records

12. Pantaleo on trial: the long awaited disciplinary decision

13. Melee in Mott Haven: a new wave of protests and a brutal crackdown by the NYPD

14. The end of the police secrecy law: repealing Civil Rights Law 50-a

15. The fight for justice after the George Floyd protests

16. The election of Mayor Eric Adams: a new administration moves away from police accountability

17. How an era of fighting ended in disappointment for the families of loved ones killed by the NYPD

Author’s Notes

Notes: Chapter 1

Notes: Chapter 2

Notes: Chapter 3

Notes: Chapter 4

Notes: Chapter 5

Notes: Chapter 6

Notes: Chapter 7

Notes: Chapter 8

Notes: Chapter 9

Notes: Chapter 10

Notes: Chapter 11

Notes: Chapter 12

Notes: Chapter 13

Notes: Chapter 14

Notes: Chapter 15

Notes: Chapter 16

Notes: Chapter 17

Index

1

THE ASSASSINATION OF OFFICERS WENJIAN LIU AND RAFAEL RAMOS

On the Saturday afternoon before Christmas in 2014, Ishmael Brinsley walked the streets of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy) neighborhood in camo pants marked with blood splattered from the knee down to his shin and ankle. Instead of laces in his green sneakers, there was more blood around the tongue of the 28-year-old’s left shoe. In his hand that day, police said he carried a plastic bag with a foam cup inside. Inside the cup was a silver Taurus 9-millimeter pistol.

Brinsley approached two strangers on the street. He first asked about their gang affiliations. Then he asked them to follow him on Instagram. Finally, he said, Watch what I’m gonna do.

New York Police Department (NYPD) officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were parked nearby in a police cruiser on the corner of Myrtle Ave. and Tompkins Ave. The two cops worked at the 84th precinct, which covers a part of Brooklyn closer to downtown, but had been loaned out to the 79th precinct that patrolled Bed-Stuy. Liu and Ramos were assigned to stake out the Tompkins Houses, a sprawling 12-acre housing project. There had been recent reports of violence in the area, but things were calm for now on this weekend afternoon.

Brinsley walked up the block towards the corner of Myrtle and Tompkins. The NYPD later said that he took up a shooter’s stance as he approached the police cruiser on the passenger side. He pulled out the gun and unloaded multiple rounds into the front seat of the car.

The two ambushed officers sat slumped in the cruiser, bleeding to death from multiple gunshot wounds. Liu, 32, a seven-year veteran of the force, was newly married just two months earlier. Ramos, 40, was a three-year-veteran who joined the NYPD at age 37. He was the father of two young sons. Brinsley meanwhile headed westbound on foot towards the Myrtle Street G train subway stop.

BILL BRATTON, the Commissioner of the NYPD, was home for the holidays in Boston, Massachusetts, when he received the text message from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: We have two cops shot in Brooklyn. Bratton immediately started to make arrangements to get back to New York.

THE DAY BEFORE, Mayor de Blasio talked to a journalist at the New York Times about the rising tensions between himself and the police department. The progressive Democrat was still in the first year of a four-year term as New York City’s 109th mayor. He had campaigned on a platform of police reform, and in the interview, he called the NYPD a department in evolution. But in reality, the new mayor had spent his first year in office in an off-and-on feud with his police department.

It’s fair to say that he walked in the door of the Mayor’s Office at City Hall on day one with a healthy dose of skepticism from the NYPD rank-and-file. De Blasio had staked his campaign on transforming the NYPD into a police agency that was more accountable to the public. Significantly, he promised to end the NYPD’s illegal and biased use of stop and frisk.

Decades earlier, the highest court in the US ruled that it was legal for police around the country to employ stop and frisk. In 1968, in Terry v. Ohio, the court held that without probable cause, a police officer may stop and search a suspect if the officer has a reasonable suspicion that the person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime. The court also said that it is not unconstitutional to search someone if they have a reasonable belief that the person may be armed and presently dangerous.

FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, New York City was engaged in a court battle over the NYPD’s use of stop and frisk. The 1999 class-action lawsuit, Daniels, et al v. the City of New York, claimed the NYPD’s Street Crimes Unit (SCU) racially profiled and conducted stops and frisks without reasonable suspicion. In 2003, the city settled with the Daniels plaintiffs and the NYPD disbanded SCU. But the NYPD’s use of stop and frisk continued to go up and up.

In 2008, a new lawsuit that built on the Daniels suit, Floyd, et al v. the City of New York, challenged the NYPD’s use of stop and frisk department-wide. After five years of litigation, in 2013, the judge ruled in the Floyd plaintiffs’ favor and ordered the city to make extensive reforms to its policies. But New York City’s mayor at the time, Mike Bloomberg — who once said, I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world, — successfully kept the case tied up in court on appeals and stopped the reform process from beginning.

Later that year, de Blasio won the election for New York City mayor in a landslide. And in his first month in office, he made good on this key campaign promise. He dropped the appeal by his predecessor Bloomberg, calling the decision a step of profound progress in the city. But a little over five months after de Blasio declared the city would begin a healing process from the stop and frisk era, Eric Garner was killed by a police officer on Staten Island.

Garner’s death was one of several police killings of Black men in the second half of 2014 that shook the national consciousness. Just one month after Garner died, 18-year old Michael Brown, Jr. was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The two men’s deaths were the spark that ignited a national protest movement in the summer of 2014. Several of the largest protests happened across New York City with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets to call for justice.

Garner’s death wasn’t the only high-profile police killing by the NYPD in 2014 either. On November 20, an officer shot his gun in a dark stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project and killed Akai Gurley. While these killings by the NYPD in 2014 were getting attention in New York City, police killings were also getting attention across the rest of the country. On November 22, police gunned down 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland, Ohio park. Two days later, the St. Louis County prosecutor announced that a grand jury decided not to indict the Ferguson police officer who killed Brown.

On December 3, 2014, Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan announced that a grand jury declined to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the plainclothes NYPD cop captured on camera putting Eric Garner in a chokehold and refusing to release his grip while Garner pleaded, I can’t breathe.

The DA’s announcement that Pantaleo would not face criminal charges in Garner’s death set off more protests around the city. Thousands of people flooded the streets. Demonstrators carrying signs reading Fire Pantaleo, Justice for Eric Garner, and Black Lives Matter shut down city bridges. Some demonstrations turned violent, hundreds of people got arrested, and police cars were set on fire. The NYPD deployed a crowd-control device, commonly known as a sound cannon, that blared earsplitting high-frequency beeps from a speaker sitting atop a police vehicle.

On December 13, in the largest protest yet, more than 25,000 marched through New York City in a demonstration that stretched over a mile long. The protesters chanted Garner’s last words, I can’t breathe. For the most part, the march was peaceful. But as things wound down, some protesters continued to march onto the Brooklyn Bridge, where they would bring traffic to a halt. Police said the splinter group assaulted two police lieutenants. De Blasio called these actions ugly and an unacceptable departure from other protests but declined to directly criticize the grand jury decision not to indict Pantaleo. Asked about reports that protesters were assaulting police officers, he added that they allegedly assaulted the cops.

De Blasio did use the occasion of the Staten Island grand jury decision in the Garner case to talk about his 17-year-old Black son Dante. The night that the DA announced Pantaleo wouldn’t be charged, the White mayor told the press that he and his wife Chirlane, who is Black, often worried that when Dante went out, he wasn’t totally safe — not just from the bad guys, but the good guys in blue meant to protect him.

These remarks summoned the ire of Patrick Lynch, the outspoken, brash four-term president of the Police Benevolent Association, the NYPD’s union for rank-and-file officers. The top boss at the PBA since 1999, with his slicked-back hair, sharp suits with notched lapels (always adorned with an American flag pin), Lynch was a throwback to the NYPD’s tough-on-crime era that he came up in at the police department in the ‘80s and ‘90s. In public appearances, Lynch had a propensity for accusatory outbursts directed against his adversaries.

The union boss was outraged by the mayor’s defense of the protesters and lack thereof for the police. Regarding the mayor’s remarks about Dante, Lynch responded that we should teach our children to respect the police even if we think they are wrong. Regarding Pantaleo, he said he was a good cop caught in a bad situation.

While Pat Lynch certainly remained the most publicly visible police union leader in the city, Ed Mullins, President of Sergeant’s Benevolent Association (SBA), was actually the most bombastic.

Mullins joined the NYPD in 1982. Just a few years into his career, he was elected a union delegate for his precinct. In 2002, he became the president of the SBA.

Mullins’ personal history of making his issues with city leadership and its treatment of police publicly known predated Mayor de Blasio. For example, in 2006, he demanded that Mayor Bloomberg apologize after he said he was deeply disturbed by the shooting of 23-year-old Sean Bell, who was out celebrating on the eve of his wedding when he was killed outside a club in Jamaica, Queens, by plainclothes officers who fired off 50 rounds.

But Mullins and the SBA’s rhetoric reached new raging heights during the de Blasio administration. During de Blasio’s tenure, Mullins referred to the mayor as a liar and said he was full of shit. After de Blasio talked about how he and his wife spoke to their Black son after Garner was killed, Mullins called de Blasio moronic. The SBA also paid for a full page ad in the New York Post and New York Times after Garner’s death that cautioned the Democratic National Committee from holding its next convention at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn as de Blasio had requested. In the ad, the SBA wrote that under de Blasio, New York City is lurching backwards to the bad old days of high crime, danger-infested public spaces, and families that walk our streets worried for their safety.

A week before the shooting of Ramos and Liu, de Blasio’s trouble with the police unions only escalated. The PBA circulated a form asking officers to sign-up if they would prefer that if they get killed in the line of duty that the mayor did not attend their funeral.

While things were tense between de Blasio and the unions publicly, behind the scenes, the mayor and Lynch engaged in a strained dialogue over the PBA’s contract. When de Blasio took office every labor union in the city — which amounted to more than 150 different bargaining units — was working under expired contracts. The new mayor managed to negotiate with every union, but the PBA proved to be one of the toughest groups to get a deal done with.

For more than two years, the PBA members had worked without a contract. And the state of those negotiations as the end of 2014 neared could be described as a complete and utter stalemate. In the spring, Lynch and his union had declared an impasse in negotiations with the mayor. By the end of the year, after the PBA had rejected the city’s offers, the two sides were no closer to a deal and headed for arbitration.

Despite all the grappling with the police unions since the decision not to charge Pantaleo, de Blasio seemed to believe that cooler heads would prevail. In his interview with the Times the day before the officers were shot in Bed-Stuy, de Blasio said, There’s going to be a feeling, sort of a calming dynamic as people settle into a new approach.

About 75 NYPD officers responded to the shooting scene in Bed-Stuy, a witness estimated. Within minutes after the shots rang out, a police cruiser occupied each street corner on the neighborhood grid. Some cops ran towards Ramos and Liu. Others ran towards the subway.

Two Con Edison employees out in the neighborhood doing utility work had spotted Ishmael Brinsley walking towards the Myrtle Street G train and pursued him in their truck. Brinsley noticed them, turned and pointed his gun, and asked them if they want some. They backed off and called 911. Brinsley disappeared down the subway steps.

Moments later, NYPD officers rushed down the same steps and busted onto the subway platform, yelling, everybody get down! A pregnant woman waiting for the train later told the New York Post that people started running to try to get out of the subway station. She said she threw herself on the ground. I was afraid for myself and my baby.

As cops moved in, Brinsley turned and said, Oh, shit. He raised the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. As officers carried Brinsley’s body up the subway steps, the first part of the dead cop-killer that passersby could see emerge from underground were his bloody sneakers and camo pants.

Back on the corner of Myrtle and Tompkins, it was chaos in the street. A crowd had started to gather along with the hoard of cops, all sharing the disbelief that two officers had just been gunned down in broad daylight.

One video shared on social media showed Officer Ramos getting pulled out of the car and carried onto the sidewalk. His fellow officers placed him on the ground and began chest compressions. Yo, that is crazy, the woman filming on her phone said. Other cops paced around, looking despondent. It appeared nobody was doing much crowd control. Some of the distraught officers, who could be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed, seemed like they didn’t know what to do with themselves at the moment. What’s going on? a person asked the woman filming the scene. Two cops just got shot in the head, she responded.

Information quickly surfaced about Brinsley — who resided in Maryland at the time — and the hours leading up to the assassination of Liu and Ramos. Early that morning, he arrived at an apartment complex in the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills. He went to the third floor of the development and knocked on his ex-girlfriend’s door. When she opened the door, he pointed his gun at his head. She talked him down from killing himself. But then he shot her in the gut and stole her phone.

Brinsley took off and left the woman for dead. But she was able to struggle her way to the apartment of a neighbor who called the police. Meanwhile, Brinsley boarded a BoltBus destined for New York City. After he left the apartment complex, Brinsley called his ex-girlfriend’s mother and said he was sorry for what he had done. She hung up the phone and called the Baltimore police.

On the way to New York, Brinsley posted on his Instagram from his ex-girlfriend’s phone. He uploaded a photo of his pants and shoes, covered in her blood. Never Had A Hot Gun On Your Waist And Blood On Your Shoe, the photo caption said. He also posted his gun with an ominous message that read in part, I’m putting wings on pigs today. He included the hashtags #RIPErivGardner, #RIPMikeBrown, and #ShootThePolice.

When the Baltimore County police discovered the posts, they alerted the NYPD and told them that Brinsley had his shooting victim’s phone. Brinsley arrived in Midtown Manhattan and hopped on the subway for Brooklyn. Police said he dumped the phone near the Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn at 12:07 pm. From then until two hours later, when he shot the officers, his whereabouts were unknown. At around 2 pm, Baltimore County police sent the NYPD a fax with a wanted poster with Brinsley’s picture. But the NYPD didn’t receive the fax until 2:46 pm, just one minute before Liu and Ramos were shot and killed.

On the day of the shooting, the New York Post ran the headline: ‘Gunman executes 2 NYPD cops in Garner ‘revenge.’ NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton was convinced in what he believed had happened to Liu and Ramos. No warning, no provocation, they were quite simply assassinated, targeted for their uniform, he said.

Rumors and speculation began to swirl about Brinsley and his motive for shooting Liu and Ramos. The New York City tabloids printed a story, citing police sources, that claimed Brinsley was linked to a prison gang that wanted to kill cops to avenge Garner and others. But a federal probe later debunked this theory.

In an in-depth profile on the gunman, the New York Times poked holes in this narrative that Brinsley was a part of some conspiracy to wage a revenge war against the police. The Times reviewed his history and spoke to those close to him, concluding that Brinsley was an unfocused drifter who was troubled that he could never gain success in life.

He was also not a hardened criminal. Though he had been arrested more than a dozen times and spent a couple of years in jail, most of his arrests were for thefts and other low-level offenses. One detail about Brinsley that stood out — and showed how unstable he was at the time — was that, according to the Times, he had told the mother of one of his children he was going to kill himself in the weeks leading up to the shooting.

Brinsley was like an unmoored, placeless individual, said Matthew Vaz, a historian and professor at City College of New York. He’s like the poor ghetto man of the internet age.

Liu and Ramos were taken to Woodhull Medical Center just around the corner from the Tompkins Houses. Mayor De Blasio and Commissioner Bratton arrived at the hospital that night to meet with their families.

The Woodhull corridors were overflowing with fellow officers from the NYPD. After meeting with the families, de Blasio made his way through the crowd of cops to a press conference with Bratton. As he weaved his way through the officers, several turned their back on the mayor.

PBA President Pat Lynch had also arrived at the hospital. Bratton wrote in his memoir that after hearing rumors that the officers might turn their backs on the mayor, he and his number two at the NYPD, Chief of Department James O’Neill confronted Lynch. They asked him not to do it. Lynch told Bratton he wasn’t involved in planning any such demonstration. According to Bratton, this denial caused the typically mild-mannered O’Neill to explode. He told Lynch, You are full of shit!

Bratton wrote that O’Neill told Lynch: These guys will do whatever you tell them to do! Now this is about you fuckers, instead of the two dead cops downstairs.

In the hallway of the hospital, de Blasio was forced to carve a path with bright white block letters laminated on the back of jackets that read NYPD POLICE, glaring back at him. Among the group of officers with his back turned on the mayor was Lynch. Of course, nobody expected de Blasio and Lynch to link arms and console the Liu and Ramos families together at the hospital. But this public display of disrespect seemed designed to increase the tension growing between the union and the mayor.

That night at the hospital, there were two separate press conferences held. De Blasio and Bratton, tears in their eyes, addressed the press together. The mayor called what happened to Liu and Ramos a despicable act.

When a police officer is murdered, it tears at the foundation of our society, he said. It is an attack on all of us. It’s an attack on everything we hold dear.

Outside the hospital, Lynch also spoke to the media. Flanked by other union representatives, wearing a blue NYPD windbreaker with a PBA emblem over a shirt and tie, Lynch was as enraged and fiery as he had ever been.

There’s blood on many hands tonight — those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protests that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did every day. That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.

A week later, the first funeral was held. Two days after Christmas, family, friends, top NYPD brass, and New York City officials gathered to honor Rafael Ramos at Christ Tabernacle Church in Glendale, Queens.

Vice President Joe Biden spoke at the funeral. Police officers and police families are a different breed — thank God for them, he said. Ramos’s grieving wife wore dark sunglasses, big and round, but not big enough to hide the stream of tears. His two sons, Jaden and Justin, wore matching black-on-black suits. Black shirts, black ties, and black blazers. Over his suit, Justin wore his dad’s NYPD jacket.

His dad was the best father I could ask for, Jaden said at the funeral. On the day Ramos died, Jaden wrote on Facebook: Everyone says they hate cops but they are the people that they call for help.

Outside the church, 20,000 police officers gathered in the streets to honor Officer Ramos. Cops from New Rochelle to New Orleans and Los Angeles had come to Queens. A video feed of the ceremony happening inside Christ Tabernacle was played for the officers lining the sidewalks on a jumbotron.

When Bratton spoke at the funeral, he acknowledged the animosity and tension between the police force and the protesters in the street after Garner was killed. He started his remarks by talking about the first police funeral he attended 44 years earlier. The slain officer, Boston patrolman Walter Schroeder, was shot in the back by anti-war extremists while responding to a bank hold-up, Bratton said. During the era that Schroeder got killed, Bratton said, Divisive politics polarized the city and country — maybe that sounds familiar.

Appointing Bratton as his police commissioner was a tactical move by de Blasio. Not only had he served in the role before in the mid-’90s when Rudy Giuliani was mayor, but he was also one of the most well-known and respected figures in law enforcement in the country.

During the campaign, de Blasio’s Republican opponent Joe Lhota ran ads claiming that electing the liberal de Blasio would usher in a return to the bad old days when crime ran rampant in NYC. Now that he was mayor, de Blasio hoped that Bratton’s stature would provide him cover from these sorts of political attacks while at the same time keep the rank-and-file in step with the mayor’s approach to policing in the city.

When it was de Blasio’s turn to speak at the funeral, he talked about how Ramos spent ten weeks studying to be a chaplain and said he was taken from us on the day he was meant to graduate. He said Ramos loved to play basketball with his sons in Highland Park near their home, he loved the New York Mets, and he loved blasting Spanish gospel music from his car. The mayor told the family: you epitomize the family of New York. He called Ramos a peacemaker in his church, family, and community.

Out in the streets, hundreds of officers turned their backs on the jumbotron as de Blasio spoke.

After the funeral, the mourners filed out of Christ Tabernacle. The Ramos family got in a car to accompany the casket to the Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, where the fallen officer was laid to rest. While leaving the church, de Blasio and Lynch nodded to each other. The exchange, however, by no means signified peace between the union and the mayor.

Wenjian Liu’s funeral was delayed so that his family could travel from China. On January 4, 2015, the mourners gathered at Aievoli Funeral Home on the corner of 65th St. and 13th Avenue in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Yet another crowd of 20,000 police officers filled the surrounding streets.

At the service, Liu’s wife of just two months called him her hero and soulmate. His father talked about how his only child would call his parents after every shift to say he was safe. You are the best son, you are the best husband, he said. We are very proud of you, we love you forever.

Bratton once again addressed the tension in the city during his funeral remarks. To the police force, Bratton said, A much larger part of this city, of this country, a much larger part than you think, is proud of you.

In the week between the two officers’ funerals, Bratton issued a memo to the department asking officers not to turn their backs again. A hero’s funeral is about grieving, not grievance, it said. Not everyone received his message.

When de Blasio spoke, he called Liu a young man who came here from China at the age of 12 in search of the American dream.

He also talked about the need for New York City to come together after a horrific year. Let us rededicate ourselves to those great New York traditions of mutual understanding and living in harmony, he said.

His speech was played on a Jumbotron placed at the corner of 65th Street and 14th Avenue. Once again, hundreds of officers turned their backs on the mayor.

A retired NYPD detective in the crowd that day told the Associated Press that the mayor has no respect for us, adding, why should we have respect for him?

Another former NYPD officer who retired after 22 years on the force said to the New York Times that de Blasio has been a cop hater since before he got elected mayor, adding that officers are not going to forgive him ever.

After the funeral, Lynch once again took it upon himself to speak for the officers against the mayor. They feel that City Hall has turned their back on them, and they have a right to have their opinion heard, and they did it respectfully in the street, not inside the church, he said.

Wenjian Liu’s casket, draped in the green, white, and blue NYPD flag, was carried to the hearse. They drove his body past his house and then up to Cypress Hills cemetery. In the sky above, police helicopters flew at a low altitude in the ‘missing man’ formation above the crowd.

As for the mayor, even if the tumultuous events of December 2014 with the NYPD dismayed him, it didn’t mean that de Blasio could simply just throw his hands up, move onto other political priorities and let the police department be. Progressive New Yorkers, which made up a sizable portion of the mayor’s political base, were demanding reform and more accountability for the police. A burgeoning group of activists and organizers, predominantly led by Black and Brown women and LGBTQ New Yorkers, were out in the streets pushing this message. Its ranks included the family and friends of those killed by the NYPD seeking justice for their lost loved ones.

On the other side, de Blasio was under tremendous pressure from the police force. The unions knew how to stir up controversy and would stop at nothing to resist reforms they didn’t like and preserve the status quo of the police department. Furthermore, they too were organized, with tremendous legal resources to boot. And they were prepared to do battle in court and in the court of public opinion to challenge any moves by the city that had to do with the police that they didn’t approve of.

De Blasio walked out of Liu’s funeral alongside his wife Chirlane. If he turned to look down 65th street, he could have seen an ocean of cops as far as the eye could see; waves and waves of men and women in blue. And as for the mayor’s relationship with them, it was adrift at sea.

Only a few days after Liu’s funeral, the reports of an NYPD work slowdown started to emerge. Arrests citywide dropped by over 50% during the end of 2014 compared to the same time period the year before, according to the Daily News. Likewise, the number of people who received criminal summonses for lesser offenses, moving violations, and parking summonses all fell by about 90% during the same time period. In the 84th precinct where Ramos and Liu had worked, police wrote just two tickets for moving violations. Police sources told the tabloids that this drop in police activity was a response to the cops’ anger at de Blasio.

On the same day that the slowdown reports started to surface, de Blasio and Bratton commended the NYPD while reporting a 4.6% total drop in crime in 2014. Bratton also said he asked police leadership to do a comprehensive review of the past month’s police activity. But you didn’t need to see the data to know that with more than 35,000 cops spread out across the city if this kept up and police decided not to do their jobs, things could get very bad.

With the NYPD in apparent revolt against city leadership, the only thing that was certain was that nobody was sure what might happen next.

2

POLICE UNIONS AND A HISTORY OF TENSION

The tense relationship between New York City police and the public is as old as the city itself. Before the creation of the professional NYPD in the 1840s, keeping a lid on crime in Gotham was primarily the job of the constables, a bumbling group of partially-employed lawmen that solved few crimes, often failed to arrest perpetrators and were beaten back during the frequent riots that happened in the city. Yet, as crime climbed and climbed during the nineteenth century, New Yorkers were reluctant to establish a more professional police force.

In his book, Law & Disorder, The Chaotic Birth of the NYPD, author Bruce Chadwick wrote that this hesitancy had partly to do with lingering animosity towards the British, whose army had occupied several American cities before and during the Revolutionary war. The people hated the British for doing that, Chadwick wrote. That sour feeling continued to be felt for generations, and the people saw the proposed police force as another occupying army.

A more modern-day example of the mistrust between the public and the police is the NYPD’s persistent resistance to accountability handed down from anyone outside the police ranks.

More than two decades before NYPD officers turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City’s police staged a very different protest against the city’s mayor. On September 16, 1992, the PBA mobilized 10,000 cops to City Hall. The plan was to protest Mayor David Dinkins’ plan to establish an all-civilian review board to review misconduct claims against the NYPD.

That morning, starting at around 10 am, thousands of mostly White men and women from the NYPD marched around City Hall, bellowing chants of No Justice! No Police! and The Mayor’s on crack!

The demonstrators — draped in t-shirts that read Dinkins Must Go! and holding signs with sayings including Dinkins, We Know Your True Color — Yellow Bellied — got riled up as they listened to fiery speeches from PBA President Phil Caruso and Rudy Giuliani, who lost to Dinkins in the mayoral election in 1989 and hoped to unseat him the following year. In the crowd, the officers booed and jeered and cried out racial slurs. Legendary New York City reporter Jimmy Breslin wrote in Newsday that he heard an officer call out: Now you got a nigger inside City Hall. How do you like that? A nigger mayor.

About an hour into the protest, chants of Take the hall! broke out amongst the crowd. According to a New York Times report, at around 10:50 am, thousands of protesters pushed through the police barriers set up to contain them and marauded up the steps and into the hall. Three hundred fellow police officers assigned to control the event did little to stop them.

At the same time, other cops filled the nearby bars along Murray St. The revelers littered the neighborhood with beer bottles, hopped on top of cars, and blocked the traffic along Broadway. Una Clarke, a Black City Council member, told the media that the protesters blocked her from crossing the street. When she asked an officer to let her through, Clarke told a reporter, the cop turned to a fellow protester and said, This nigger says she’s a member of the City Council.

The event continued to spiral out of control after several thousand protesters left City Hall and marched onto Brooklyn Bridge. With few, if any, police around to quell them, the officers on the bridge brought traffic in both directions to a halt as they jumped on cars, stomped on the hoods, and rocked the vehicles of terrified motorists back