New York’s City Mayor has described police officers who turned their backs to him during funerals of two slain colleagues as “disrespectful.”
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New York’s City Mayor has described police officers who turned their backs to him during funerals of two slain colleagues as “disrespectful.”
NYPD officers have accused Bill de Blasio of failing to support them during the recent wave of protests over the police killings of unarmed black men.
“They were disrespectful to the families involved, that’s the bottom line. They were disrespectful to the families who had lost their loved one. And I can’t understand why anyone would do such a thing in a context like that,” complained Mayor de Blasio.
The chasm between the police unions and de Blasio has created the biggest crisis of his one-year in the job.
He as also denied reports that a sharp decline in arrests and court summonses in the two weeks since the officers died in an ambush are a signs of a police work to rule.
( The number of criminal court summonses dropped more than 90 percent to 347 from 4,077)
Tensions have arose between the police unions and de Blasio after the mayor, a liberal Democrat who campaigned on a promise of police reform, expressed qualified sympathy for the nationwide protests that began last summer in Ferguson Missouri, with the shooting dead of an unarmed black man by white police officers.