Post by bohica9 on Aug 27, 2014 19:30:04 GMT -5
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER and J. DAVID GOODMANAUG. 26, 2014
The city is hoping to bring the Democratic National Convention to the Barclays Center in Brooklyn in 2016. A union of New York City police sergeants is against the idea. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
A union of New York City police sergeants warned the Democratic National Committee on Tuesday against holding its 2016 convention in Brooklyn, issuing an open letter that doubled as a broadside against a mayoral administration with which some officers have grown increasingly frustrated.
In the letter, addressed to the group Mayor Bill de Blasio wooed during its visit to New York two weeks ago, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, Edward D. Mullins, said the city was going “backward to the bad old days of high crime, danger-infested public spaces and families that walk our streets worried for their safety.”
He presented a city overrun with “squeegee people” and other panhandlers, with shootings on the rise and morale among police officers flagging.
The city said it had enough hotel space to accommodate any guests, noting Midtown Manhattan’s proximity to the Barclays Center by train or car.
In Brooklyn, Officials Court Democrats in Bid to Host 2016 ConventionAUG. 11, 2014
“The D.N.C. should choose another venue,” said the letter, which appeared as an advertisement in The New York Times and The New York Post. “Mayor de Blasio,” it continued, “has not earned the right to play host to such an important event.”
While shootings are up slightly, according to the de Blasio administration, the homicide rate has fallen 12.3 percent this year after a 20 percent decline in 2013, when there were 335 murders, punctuating a steep drop under the former mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg. The administration also noted that overall crime had fallen 3.6 percent this year.
Mr. de Blasio, speaking at an unrelated news conference in Brooklyn on Tuesday, called the union’s actions “opportunistic” and “irresponsible.”
“It’s fear-mongering to try and benefit their own position in contract talks,” he said. “Don’t stoke fear in the city we love.”
The union, which represents 4,700 active sergeants, has a history of attention-grabbing moves during labor negotiations. Working under an expired contract in 2005, the association announced an ad campaign directed against Mr. Bloomberg and aimed primarily at the Republican stronghold of Staten Island, with a goal of weakening the mayor politically in an election year.
The letter was not signed by representatives of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest police union. Mr. Mullins said other unions had not been consulted about the letter.
Union officials and many officers have long been skeptical of Mr. de Blasio for his opposition to the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics under Mr. Bloomberg, and for his support of increased police oversight. Those fissures seem to have widened since last month, when an unarmed man, Eric Garner, died after an encounter with the police on Staten Island.
Mr. Garner’s death focused renewed attention on the “broken windows” enforcement strategy championed by the police commissioner, William J. Bratton, that calls for aggressive policing of minor offenses. Mr. Garner was approached by officers after being accused of selling untaxed cigarettes.
In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Bratton called the letter “unfortunate” and said that officers, over time, would “appreciate that a lot is being done for them.”
But Mr. Bratton added that “there’s no denying” that morale in the department has slipped. He attributed this, in part, to contract negotiations and “negative stories in the media.”
In the weeks since Mr. Garner’s death, some officers have chafed at the elevated profile of the Rev. Al Sharpton, who led thousands of people protesting police tactics in a march on Saturday. Though the letter did not mention Mr. Sharpton by name, it criticized Mr. de Blasio for offering “a public platform to the loudest of the city’s antisafety agitators.”
Mr. Mullins on Tuesday left little doubt about the subtext, lamenting a recent round-table event that placed Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Bratton on either side of the mayor. While he praised Mr. de Blasio’s appointment of Mr. Bratton, calling him “the right guy for the job,” Mr. Mullins said his members were disturbed by “another appointment that he made, which is a signal and is confusing, and that is the appointment of Al Sharpton to the table sitting next to him.”
The letter undercut, deliberately or not, a longtime point of pride for Mr. Bratton, his focus on subway crime. Mr. Mullins said that “aggressive panhandlers and con men are populating the subways and Times Square.”
While the letter described the department as “understaffed, overworked and underpaid,” Mr. Bratton said that he had received “everything I’ve been asking for” from City Hall.
“I’ll be asking for a lot more in the months ahead, in terms of resources,” he said.
Voters appear split on the mayor’s handling of police issues. According to a Quinnipiac University poll released on Tuesday, 46 percent of voters approve and 44 percent disapprove of his management of the relations between the police and community. The poll’s margin of sampling error was plus or minus three percentage points.
A majority of voters, 55 percent to 33 percent, approved of the way Mr. de Blasio was handling relations between blacks and whites, though the results diverged along racial lines. White voters approved, 46 percent to 41 percent; Hispanic voters approved, 58 percent to 31 percent; and black voters approved, 67 percent to 22 percent.