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A Time to Testify
When someone writes the history of Bill de Blasio's mayoralty, the moment on Thursday when heckling and booing totally drowned out his words at the George Floyd memorial service will likely go down as the point when everything faded to black. It is unlikely the mayor will be removed from office but it hardly matters. De Blasio is a lame-duck mayor with with zero political capital and few allies running a city that is billions in the red. His mayoralty is effectively over.
There will be time someday to argue over what combination of bad luck, bad actors, bad coverage and bad moves on his part devoured the de Blasio mayoralty; suffice it to say there were healthy doses of all four. The question now—amid our three-sided civil rights, economic and health crisis—is whether the mayor can pull himself out of the whirlpool long enough to defend the city's right to self-government.
Sometimes it is handy to hit bottom. De Blasio has no political future, and it is doubtful the first lady does, either. If rank-and-file cops hate him as much as their union leaders suggest, he can hardly offend them more. The editorial boards already despise him. Gov. Cuomo has kneecapped him too often for it to hurt anymore. The left is through with him. The unions are mostly thinking about 2021. De Blasio has nothing left to lose.
For years the mayor has tried to thread the needle on criminal justice. He did push through significant reforms. He also did embrace outdated policing approaches, like Broken Windows. He was pulled into closing Rikers, then owned that cause. In the past week, besides deploring violence against cops as every mayor should, he has oscillated between condemning and condoning police actions against protesters. These issues can be complex, but his parsing has always given off the odor of calculation.
There is nothing to be afraid of anymore. De Blasio can tell us what he really thinks, as the father of Black children, as the commander of 36,000 cops, as a human being. If he thinks there's still something fundamentally wrong with policing in the city, he can say it. If he thinks reforms have gone far enough, then own up to it. If he feels he cannot control the NYPD, the people have a right to know that.
With luck, that kind of full, unfiltered, consistent candor might win de Blasio enough respect from some side of the city to allow him to fulfill his duty through December 31, 2021. At worst, the hecklers will grow hoarse and move on.
Jarrett Murphy
executive editor
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