Rank and file New York City police officers dramatically escalated their feud with Mayor Bill De Blasio Friday. A group of them reportedly hired a plane to fly over the city while carrying a banner that said: “De Blasio Our Backs Have Turned To You.”
The plane reportedly flew five circles above the Hudson River before returning to a local airport.
John Cardillo, a retired NYC police officer, stated on his blog that he had arranged for the banner after hundreds of people on the police force asked him to do it on their behalf. The banner refers to an incident last week when cops literally turned their backs to De Blasio when he visited a hospital shortly after two Brooklyn cops, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, had been fatally shot by a man who was reportedly motivated by his hatred of police.
The shooter was reportedly angered after a grand jury refused on Dec. 3 to indict a police officer in the July death of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who had been allegedly selling illegal cigarettes. Garner died after being restrained in a chokehold, an incident that sparked mass city-wide anti-police protests.
NYC Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Pat Lynch said Saturday the officers’ deaths left “blood on many hands” of those who “incited violence on the street under the guise of protest.”
De Blasio’s critics say his actions after the grand jury’s announcement inflamed the anti-police sentiment. Rather than fully defending the police’s actions, De Blasio met with the protesters and called Garner’s death “a terrible tragedy that no family should have to endure.”
The mayor — a liberal who campaigned in 2013 on ending police’s “stop and frisk” practice, arguing it was unconstitutional — later said he and his wife had advised their biracial son to be wary around police: “We’ve had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.”
The latter comments particularly upset members of the force, Cardillo said, because it implied that the force was racist. He issued a statement linking the mayor’s actions to the slain cops:
De Blasio spokesman Wiley Norville told the New York Daily News city residents should be thinking of ways to “honor our fallen officers. Dividing people won’t help our city heal.”
Before observing a moment of silence for the slain officers Tuesday, De Blasio said: “We need to protect and respect our police just as our police protect and respect our communities. We can strike that balance. We must.”
