New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday the city skipped over the permitting process used by people who wish to create street art when it painted Black Lives Matter outside Trump Tower on 5th Avenue last month.
“That is something that again transcends all normal realities because we are at a moment of history when that had to be said and done. That’s a decision I made,” de Blasio said at a news conference. “We haven’t said ‘no’ to people. We’ve said, ‘If you want to apply, you can apply, but there’s a process.'”
The mayor was asked about the process the city went through before it painted the artwork after a women’s group supporting President Trump sued the city for blocking its permit to paint the phrase “Engaging, Inspiring, and Empowering Women to Make a Difference!”on a city street.
“The normal process continues for anyone who wants to apply,” de Blasio said.
Since being painted last month, the Black Lives Matter artwork in Manhattan has been vandalized multiple times. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office called the instances of vandalism “unacceptable.”
Critics of de Blasio have said the city has not been fast enough to clean the artwork after it was vandalized.
“They said City Hall doesn’t seem to care any longer about this BLM logo,” Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa said in an interview with the New York Post. “The mayor seems to have ADD on this matter, like he does most matters in NYC.”
Leadership at the New York Police Department has criticized de Blasio for his embracing of the Black Lives Matter movement and deep cuts to law enforcement in recent weeks.
“We’re committed to seeing a shift of funding to youth services, to social services, that will happen literally in the course of the next three weeks, but I’m not going to go into detail because it is subject to negotiation and we want to figure out what makes sense,” de Blasio said while announcing more than $1 billion in cuts to the NYPD budget. “It may be true to say that no people in government have ever dealt with so complex and so deep a challenge.”
