New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio gave his top cop a vote of confidence Tuesday, telling reporters he’s not considering replacing Commissioner Dermot Shea or any other leaders within the city’s police department.
The support comes at a time when there’s tension between the city’s leaders and its law enforcement officers. In wake of the protests over George Floyd’s death in Minnesota, the state Legislature approved a slate of new measures opposed by police unions. The city followed up by slashing the department’s budget by a billion dollars.
There’s also some discord about what caused the high level of violence in the city over the holiday weekend. According to the New York Times, 64 people were shot, and 10 killed in the spate of shootings.
The mayor on Monday blamed it on people being “cooped up for months” because of the COVID-19 crisis. At the same briefing, Terence Monahan, NYPD’s chief of department, said the pandemic was partly responsible, but added the antagonism officers face on the street is among the issues hindering cops from doing their job properly.
“Just about everyone we deal with is looking to fight a police officer when we go to make an arrest,” Monahan said Monday.
When de Blasio announced crime statistics on Monday, he did so with Monahan, instead of Shea, who was meeting with prosecutors and the chief judge to discuss getting the courts back in operation. Some wondered if that was a sign that Shea may be on the way out.
On Tuesday, the mayor tried to defuse the situation.
“This leadership group has achieved so much for this city, and … I’m worried that sometimes people see things only through the prism of an immediate moment,” de Blasio said.
That group, he said, has helped transform the department to the point where the majority of officers are now minorities. It’s also made the city safer while reducing arrests.
“Sometimes people have different perspectives, and that’s OK, but we are united in the broad approach,” de Blasio added. “Look, we all believe in neighborhood policing. We all believe that the only way we’re going to move forward is with communities working with the people of this city and that we’re going through an unprecedented crisis, but we will overcome it because we always do.”
De Blasio also shot down any notion that the city may look to bring back the stop-and-frisk, which he deemed as both overly racist and a failed policy.
“I think the people of this city feel very, very strongly that it was a mistake,” he said. “And I think it put our officers in a horrible situation as well and a very unproductive situation on top of being one that was in effect discriminatory. So, no, I don’t see us going back there.”
