Police Unions’ Leaders Air Grievances in 2-Hour Meeting With de Blasio

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER and J. DAVID GOODMAN

Mayor Bill de Blasio, moving to negotiate the gravest challenge of his one-year tenure, met on Tuesday with police union leaders who have been sharply critical of him since the shooting deaths of two New York City officers more than a week ago.

The extraordinary two-hour meeting, at the new Police Academy in Queens, amounted to a private airing of grievances between union officials who have long been skeptical of the mayor and an administration that has lately been upended by the killings and their aftermath.

The gathering, to which Mr. de Blasio had invited the union officials, appeared to yield no concrete results, providing no immediate balm for the fractious relationship between the mayor and his police force.

"Our thought here today is that actions speak louder than words, and time will tell," said Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, who has been perhaps the most vocal critic of Mr. de Blasio in recent weeks.

he meeting produced a series of notable moments, placing the mayor face to face with his most strident detractors — flanked by top administration officials — with no clear objective beyond improving the recent tenor. Among the unions’ complaints were the wide latitude given to protesters in recent weeks and the mayor’s relationship with the Rev. Al Sharpton.

At one point, according to people familiar with the gathering, the head of the detectives’ union gave Mr. de Blasio a lecture on public relations, noting the significance of a mayor’s comments on policing.

The mayor, in turn, urged attendees to consult his past comments on the police, suggesting they would find nothing disparaging.

Mr. de Blasio emphasized his common ground with the unions, highlighting his reservations about a City Council bill requiring officers to identify themselves during exchanges with civilians and to give a reason for the encounters. He also said antipolice vitriol from protesters was unacceptable and noted that he had brought in a highly respected commissioner, William J. Bratton.

The conversations from the meeting were described as blunt but not impolite, with a focus on the safety of both officers and the New Yorkers they are asked to protect.

"There was no yelling," said Al O’Leary, a spokesman for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest police union, "and there was no laughing."

Some officials suggested that the length alone was a signal that the sides could communicate as professionals. One person noted that pastries were provided for the meeting, which occurred in a room on the academy’s eighth floor, but that despite the duration of the sit-down, the food was not touched.

No immediate resolutions were apparent. The mayor did not engage the union leaders when they mentioned Mr. Sharpton, according to a person familiar with the meeting. When the unions mentioned the recent protest from officers who turned their backs to the mayor at the funeral of Officer Rafael Ramos, the mayor acknowledged that he must find a way to "turn them back around," in the person’s words, but did not specify how that might happen.

"I was expecting more," a union official who was in the room said. "In fairness to the mayor, he is asking for conversation to move forward."

But when the discussion ended, the official said, "we were all scratching our heads over what is getting solved."

The gathering was perhaps the mayor’s most significant attempt to defuse tensions with officers. Over the last week, Mr. de Blasio has largely declined to address his critics, avoiding reporters and focusing his public remarks on the slain officers’ families and the need to unite the city.

Phil Walzak, the mayor’s press secretary, said the meeting "focused on building a productive dialogue, and identifying ways to move forward together."

Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Bratton left without speaking to reporters. The mayor was also joined by other top police officials, including James P. O’Neill, the chief of department, and Benjamin B. Tucker, the first deputy commissioner. First Deputy Mayor Anthony E. Shorris also attended.

The meeting was distinct from labor discussions with the unions. Three of the five police unions have already reached tentative labor agreements with the administration; the city is approaching arbitration proceedings with the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.

Officials with the administration seemed to bet that some of the union leaders might act as peacekeepers, or at least supply more measured voices, in the conflict with the patrolmen’s union.

However, in an email to members on Tuesday, Roy T. Richter, president of the Captains’ Endowment Association, said that he would allow the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association to "lead any conversation." He added that he stood "in solidarity with them as they express raw outrage against the forces that caused the coldblooded assassination of our two brother police officers."

Mr. Richter compared the emotional climate of the day to that immediately following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He wrote that he had met privately with Mr. de Blasio — "at his request" — just before Christmas "to give him a blunt critique of the hostile antipolice environment" in the city.

Mr. Richter seemed to express disappointment with the decision by some officers to turn their backs to Mr. de Blasio while he spoke at Officer Ramos’s funeral on Saturday. Mr. Richter acknowledged, however, that he understood officers’ anger.

At the coming funeral of Officer Wenjian Liu, who along with Officer Ramos was killed on Dec. 20, "the appropriate protest is not a sign or turning away from mourners, or people the family has asked to speak," Mr. Richter wrote, "but rather cold, steely silence."

Many of the rank and file have long been wary of the mayor, who has pledged to reshape the department and campaigned last year on a platform of curbing the aggressive use of stop-and-frisk tactics.

After the shooting, Mr. Lynch suggested responsibility for the deaths "starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor."

Officers, led by union officials, first turned their backs to Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Bratton at Woodhull Hospital as the two prepared to address the public hours after the shooting. Some officers reprised the protest at Officer Ramos’s funeral, drawing rebukes from several elected officials.

Even before the killings, union leaders distributed a letter allowing officers to request that the mayor not attend their funerals in the event of a line-of-duty death.

Some officers were particularly bothered by Mr. de Blasio’s comments earlier this month after a grand jury declined to bring criminal charges against a white police officer in the case of Eric Garner, the unarmed black man who died after a police chokehold on Staten Island in July.

The mayor said at the time that he had advised his son, Dante, who is biracial, to "take special care" in any police encounter. Union leaders said the mayor had implied that officers were to be feared. Mr. Bratton has defended the remarks, saying on "Meet the Press" on Sunday that he had interacted with "African-Americans of all classes" who had expressed the same concern as the mayor.

Mr. de Blasio did not apologize for any of his comments in recent weeks; nor was he asked to, according to people familiar with the meeting.

 

Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, Michael M. Grynbaum, Benjamin Mueller and Nikita Stewart.

No One Should Be Turning Their Back...

Amy Davidson The New Yorker

 

 

 

Whom are police officers turning their backs on when they refuse to face Mayor Bill de Blasio, and whom are they protecting? On the night of Saturday, December 20th, after a man named Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot the officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, execution style, outside of a Bedford-Stuyvesant housing project, a line of officers who’d gathered at the Woodhull Medical Center faced away from the Mayor as he walked passed them. They were mourning and distraught; one might wish that they realized more fully that the city and its mayor were mourning with them, but it was the sort of act of shocked grief that can be forgiven the next day. That was more than a week ago, though. Since then, Patrick Lynch, the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, a police union, all but called de Blasio the officers’ killer—he had “blood on his hands.” At Ramos’s funeral, held two days after Christmas, the officers in an overflow crowd outside the church turned their backs on the screen showing de Blasio giving his eulogy. Then, on Monday, at the graduation ceremony for the city’s police academy, members of the audience shouted “Traitor!” when de Blasio spoke, and there was scattered back-turning, though not, apparently, among the newest officers. De Blasio, in a speech that was almost abject, said, “You will confront all the problems that plague our society—problems that you didn’t create.” According to the Times, “a heckler yelled out ‘You did!’ and drew applause.”

But what, exactly, did de Blasio do? What was his “betrayal,” to borrow another of Lynch’s bitter phrases? After a grand jury failed to indict anyone in the death of Eric Garner, even though a video showed an officer putting him in what, by the N.Y.P.D.’s own rules, was an impermissible chokehold, de Blasio said that many in the city “did not want” that outcome. But he was less than explicit about what he wished, other than for any protests to be peaceful and, more generally, to not have to worry about how the police might deal with a child like his son Dante. Perhaps a fantasy mayor would have come out smiling following the news of the grand jury and presented it as a vindication. But what or whom would have been defended with a gesture like that? How would the city have been served by what whole communities would have experienced as scorn? (The Mayor may be the target here, but the message that members of the police will turn their backs on those who criticize them, excluding them from a circle of protection, is broad and unhelpful.) De Blasio promised, in his campaign, to do away with the N.Y.P.D.’s stop-and-frisk policies. A court case had already given him and the city good reason. Voters agreed, a source of tense confrontations was removed, and, in the year since, crime has fallen. He reacted defensively to criticism of his wife’s chief of staff, who, among other problems, had a boyfriend with a criminal record. Yet, at the same time, he brought in Bill Bratton, hardly a flaming radical, as his police commissioner.

Creating a space for peaceful, lawful protests is not what killed Ramos and Liu. The murderer was Brinsley, a lifetime petty criminal who didn’t even live in New York. Hours before the killings, he was in an apartment in Baltimore, pointing a gun at his girlfriend, Shaneka Thompson. He shot her in the abdomen; she survived, and he fled to Brooklyn. He posted an Instagram message saying “I’m putting wings on pigs today. They take 1 of ours … let’s take 2 of theirs.” At that point, he had already come close to putting “wings on” Shaneka Thompson, and any police officer in the country would have had good reason to arrest him in defense of a young, black woman. Brinsley added a “shootthepolice” hashtag and ones about Garner and Michael Brown; after news of the shooting, those words, his would-be excuses, were seen as explosive. They only are, though, if someone like Brinsley gets to decide what is “ours” and what is “theirs”—and who the us in “let’s” is. And he doesn’t. Ramos and Liu were ours; claiming them has nothing to do with race. Brinsley was nobody’s.

There is clearly anger toward de Blasio within the police force, as well as heartfelt dislike. It may be the legitimate result of a thousand acts of clumsiness and cultural blindness on the Mayor’s part. No matter the statistics, officers like Ramos and Liu, or Russel Timoshenko and Herman Yan, put their lives on the line. De Blasio is the mayor, and it is his job to form connections with people who have one of the hardest, most dangerous jobs in the city. Clearly he can do better, but it is also clear that he is trying. The police may feel left out, or that people don’t understand the hard work they have done—that new residents born in distant, safer places think they are the ones who’ve transformed Bushwick or Bed-Stuy, as if a peaceful city requires only artful curators, not custodians. For members of the police, suddenly places they didn’t want to patrol are places they can hardly afford to live on an officer’s salary. Their dismay may be understandable. But it should not be enraging. New York is a much safer city than it used to be, and that requires an adjustment by police officers, too. This may be where the N.Y.P.D.’s own leadership has failed. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association recently put a message on its Web site saying “Don’t let them insult your sacrifice!” It linked to a document that officers could sign asking de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito not to come to their funerals if they are killed in the line of duty, saying that it would be an “insult” due to their “consistent refusal to show police officers the support and respect they deserve.” The statement is not a request to remove politics from funerals, but rather an effort to politicize them.

De Blasio did go to Ramos’s funeral—the insult would have been if he hadn’t. He spoke about Ramos’s love for his wife, Maritza (“the love of his life and the partner in all things”), and his sons, Justin and Jaden (“they are Mets fans. God bless them. And he loved playing basketball with his sons in Highland Park”). He added a few words in Spanish (“era un padre y esposo amoroso, un hombre de mucha fe”). Officer Ramos was studying to be a pastor, and Vice-President Joseph Biden, who also spoke at the funeral, said that he “didn’t just have a Bible in his locker; he lived it in his heart.” Wenjian Liu will be buried this coming weekend (the services were delayed to allow relatives to get here from China; that these two men are the ones Brinsley found randomly is a reflection of the N.Y.P.D.’s real diversity, as well as the city’s). Many of the officers outside were not New Yorkers; they had come from California, the United Kingdom, and places in between, and so it is hard to say what they knew about de Blasio when they made their act of protest, or what they knew about this city. They might answer that they knew what they needed to about being cops, and, sometimes, about being alone. That would be better expressed by moving toward people—the officers’ families, the communities they live in, even the Mayor—rather than showing their backs. The same could undoubtedly be said of some of those in the crowds that protested the grand jury’s verdict. Facing each other, those on each side might be surprised by what they see. The time for turning away is over.

Police Respect Squandered in Attacks on de Blasio

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD NY TIMES

Mayor Bill de Blasio has spent weeks expressing his respect and admiration for the New York Police Department, while calling for unity in these difficult days, but the message doesn’t seem to be sinking in.

When he spoke at a police graduation ceremony at Madison Square Garden on Monday, some in the crowd booed and heckled him. This followed the mass back-turning by scores of officers when the mayor spoke on Saturday at the funeral of Officer Rafael Ramos; the virtual back-turning the day before by an airplane-towed banner ("Our backs have turned to you"), and the original spiteful gesture by officers on the night Mr. de Blasio visited the hospital where Officer Ramos and his partner, Wenjian Liu, lay dead.

Mr. de Blasio isn’t going to say it, but somebody has to: With these acts of passive-aggressive contempt and self-pity, many New York police officers, led by their union, are squandering the department’s credibility, defacing its reputation, shredding its hard-earned respect. They have taken the most grave and solemn of civic moments — a funeral of a fallen colleague — and hijacked it for their own petty look-at-us gesture. In doing so, they also turned their backs on Mr. Ramos’s widow and her two young sons, and others in that grief-struck family.

These are disgraceful acts, which will be compounded if anyone repeats the stunt at Officer Liu’s funeral on Sunday.

The New York Police Department is going through a terrible time, and the assassinations of those officers only underscore the dreadful dangers that rank-and-file cops face every day. And, in truth, there is some thanklessness to being a cop. Officers often feel beleaguered, jerked around by supervisors and politicians, obligated to follow rules and policies that can be misguided, held responsible for their mistakes in ways that the public is not, exposed to frequent ridicule and hostility from the people they are sworn to serve. It has always been that way with cops.

But none of those grievances can justify the snarling sense of victimhood that seems to be motivating the anti-de Blasio campaign — the belief that the department is never wrong, that it never needs redirection or reform, only reverence. This is the view peddled by union officials like Patrick Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association — that cops are an ethically impeccable force with their own priorities and codes of behavior, accountable only to themselves, and whose reflexive defiance in the face of valid criticism is somehow normal.

It’s not normal. Not for a professional class of highly trained civil servants, which New York’s Finest profess to be. The police can rightly expect, even insist upon, the respect of the public. But respect is a finite resource. It cannot be wasted. Sometimes it has to be renewed.

The failures of some cops, the misguided policing tactics that feed a sense of oppression in parts of the city, the offensive provocations of some in the police-reform protest movement, and the horrific killings of two officers, have led the city to a dangerous point.

But there is a way out of this cul-de-sac. It was stated at Officer Ramos’s funeral by an exemplary public servant — and stout de Blasio ally — Commissioner William Bratton.

He put it beautifully: "The police, the people who are angry at the police, the people who support us but want us to be better, even a madman who assassinated two men because all he could see was two uniforms, even though they were so much more. We don’t see each other. If we can learn to see each other, to see that our cops are people like Officer Ramos and Officer Liu, to see that our communities are filled with people just like them, too. If we can learn to see each other, then when we see each other, we’ll heal. We’ll heal as a department. We’ll heal as a city. We’ll heal as a country."

The mayor will be meeting Tuesday with leaders of the five police unions to lower the temperature and to move the city forward. He has been doing and saying the right things, but he also seems to be taking great pains not to say anything to set off the cops. Surely many officers understand and accept his conciliatory words and realize that the things Mr. de Blasio has done — like hiring Mr. Bratton, increasing financing for the department and modernizing its equipment — are motivated by an honest desire to do right by the Police Department.

The grieving rank-and-file need to recognize this and also see the damage that many of their colleagues, and their union representatives, are doing to trash their department’s reputation.

TPM Editor's Blog

Who Do You Work For?

Josh Marshall TPM

  

   

AP Photo / John Minchillo

ByJosh MarshallPublishedDecember 23, 2014, 2:27 PM EST 17490 views

Here in New York, over the last few weeks, we've seen a turbulent and tragic series of events which might seem far-fetched in its plot line if had it unfolded in a novel. Protests erupted in the aftermath of a Staten Island grand jury's decision not to indict a police officer in the death of Eric Garner, an event which was itself catalyzed and primed by the roiling protests in response to the death of Michael Brown near St Louis. Major street protests followed. And then, as if to bring all the tension to a head, a deranged and violent man perpetrates what can only be called a street execution of two police officers waiting in their car in Bed-Stuy. The fact that the alleged assailant, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, attempted to kill his ex-girlfriend hours earlier in Maryland suggests there was some deeper, more personal impulse to violence and self-destruction behind his rampage. But there is no getting around the fact that at a minimum he grabbed on to the wave of protest against police brutality to provide some logic or rationale for his violent end.

So now we have police and their critics, each with their own righteous aggrievement, thrust together for a collision with no good outcome for anyone involved.

Before the killing of the two officers, actually just a day before, I wrote this post about Pat Lynch, the head of the biggest NYPD police union. By then, Lynch had asked officers to fill out forms requesting that the Mayor not attend their funerals if they died in the line of duty. This was followed by a union meeting in which Lynch appeared to call for a slowdown of police work in response to a lack of "support" and "respect" from the city's political leaders and went as far as to say de Blasio "is not running the city of New York. He thinks he’s running a fucking revolution.”

As I said at the time, the head of the police union isn't an active member of the force. So he gets leeway serving officers might not. But still, as the official spokesman of the officers' labor organization this seemed like really over the top rhetoric. And with that lead-in it probably wasn't that surprising to see his vitriolic response following the deaths of officers Ramos and Liu in Brooklyn. At a press conference, Lynch didn't pussy-foot around with talk of rhetoric creating climates of tension or anything like that. He went right for it.

“There’s blood on many hands tonight. Those that incited violence on the streets under the guise of protest that tried to tear down what NYPD officers did every day. We tried to warn it must not go on, it cannot be tolerated. That blood on the hands starts at City Hall in the office of the mayor. Those who allowed this to happen will be held accountable."

The Sergeants Benevolent Association held back even less.

Saying a political leader has "blood on his hands" in the immediate aftermath of a vicious murder borders on incitement. And that is quite apart from the fact that there's nothing de Blasio has done that even by the most tortured definition could make that claim make sense.

This was followed by what was first reported as a memo sent out by Lynch's union calling for ramped down enforcement and blaming the Mayor for forcing the NYPD to "for the first time in a number of years, become a "wartime" police department." The PBA later denied that the memo was an official PBA memo. The balance of evidence suggests it was circulated among union officials and by union officials but not an official union document.

That evening officers demonstrably turned their backs on de Blasio as he entered the hospital where the stricken police officers were taken after being shot.

The NYPD's conflict with de Blasio has deep roots. It goes back to the pre-Mayor days with his history as a Democratic pol, one often critical of the NYPD in the context of community-police relations. A major focus of de Blasio's campaign for Mayor was a push to end the department's so-called 'Stop and Frisk' policy, which was extremely unpopular in the black and Hispanic parts of the city, where de Blasio drew some of his strongest support. But the key moment came in the aftermath of the grand jury decision not to indict the police officer in Eric Garner's death as de Blasio struggled to thread the needle between community outrage and efforts to head off public disorder and support for the police department which he is ultimately responsible for running as Mayor. In that speech, de Blasio, among many other things, described how even he had felt the need to caution his African-American son to be careful in interactions with the police.

Here's the key passage from his talk after the Garner decision ...

This is profoundly personal for me. I was at the White House the other day, and the president of the United States turned to me, and he met Dante a few months ago, and he said that Dante reminded him of what he looked like as a teenager. And he said, I know you see this crisis through a very personal lens. I said to him I did. Because Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years, about the dangers he may face. A good young man, a law-abiding young man, who would never think to do anything wrong, and yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face—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.

This undoubtedly and unsurprisingly hit very close to the bone for many NYPD officers and it crossed a line for many of their union representatives. Yet, it's hard to believe that anyone not utterly blinkered doesn't realize that this is a conversation many black parents have with teenage sons all the time. There's something about the peculiar and particular racial dynamic of this story that gives it a unique flavor - the fact of a liberal white mayor talking about his black son. This is something white liberals cannot talk about from experience and black politicians in executive positions generally do not talk about. And yet, there it was. It was into this context that the wave of protests and then the police murders came in rapid succession.

It is difficult to overstate the degree of shock, grief and outrage a tight knit organization like a major metropolitan police department - based on internal solidarity and mutual protection - will experience in response to murders so wanton and barbaric. Hotheaded reactions and wild rhetoric are not surprising. What is notable, though, is that this escalation began well before the murders of Ramos and Liu.

What stands out to me is that at least the leadership of the city's police unions operates on the assumption that the Mayor or the city's political leaders in general need to show reflexive support and defense of the police department or else they go to war with them. Here's a passage from a piece in Politico by Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush.

That a civic tragedy would so quickly devolve into a full-blown political crisis for the new mayor was testament to the vehemence of anti-de Blasio elements in the police union – and the mayor’s mistaken belief that his 2013 victory gave him the right to shred an old Gotham political playbook that dictated a mayor show deference to the NYPD.

You can’t be big-city mayor and alienate the cops – and that’s just as true now as it was under three-term New York City Mayor Ed Koch, or even a century ago.

“Koch was loved by the cops and always told all his successors that you must have the support of the cops, that the cops can be your best friend. If Koch were alive today that’s what he would tell Bill de Blasio,” said George Arzt, former press secretary to Koch, whose election in 1977 election greatly improved City Hall-police relations.

De Blasio “needs to press reset in his relationship with the cops,” Arzt said.

Good luck with that. The bad blood between the NYPD and de Blasio is nothing new – it dates back to an election campaign centered on de Blasio’s withering criticism of the Bloomberg administration’s stop-and-frisk policy, and his close alliance with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has organized scores of protests targeting cops over their behavior toward urban blacks.

I wince reading that passage. But I do not doubt that it is an accurate portrayal of the de facto rules under which the city operates. In their press conference yesterday, Commissioner Bratton sought to defend Mayor de Blasio or put the rancor between City Hall and the NYPD in context by pointing out that the major city police unions have basically gone to war with every recent mayor. And he's right, though for different reasons with different mayors.

 

A week ago, Dylan Scott looked at why police unions are lashing out at critics in ways we haven't seen in years. It's a very good piece. I really recommend it. At one level, this is a logical response to a rising tide of protests about police misconduct. But as I wrote at the time, the intensity seems to go well beyond that. I wondered in response to Dylan's piece whether the political deference police across the country have grown accustomed to is sustainable in an era in which crime has dropped dramatically and people's sense of personal endangerment has declined.

The "blood on his hands" comments from Lynch and other police union leaders was a graphic and vicious exploitation of the tragedy of the two officers' death to pursue what is essentially a political feud with the mayor. There's no other way to put it. I don't know how representative Lynch's views are of his membership. But I'm not under any illusion that the head of the police union is greatly out of touch with many of his members. Regardless, the police cannot be an independent force, demanding reflexive institutional support irrespective of perceptions and grievances of at least substantial sections of the population they are sworn to protect. That is neither reasonable nor sustainable.

The protestors who swelled around the city weren't some kind of alien army. They're New Yorkers. And the feeling that something deeply wrong happened in the death of Eric Garner was widespread in the city. As a point of reference, polls showed that 64 percent of New Yorkers supported bringing criminal charges against Officer Daniel Pantaleo. The number was substantially lower in Staten Island itself, the most conservative of the five boroughs, where the incident occurred. But even there the number was a substantial 41 percent.

This chart created by 538 acutely captures the latent and now not latent polarization in the city. The folks who support the police and the folks who support Mayor de Blasio do not tend to be the same people. (And to put this chart in perspective, remember: whites, Staten Islanders and Republicans all to varying degrees make up only a minority of New Yorkers.)

As a political reality, no Mayor can ignore that kind of public sentiment. But as a more substantive and integral one, these are the people who employ the NYPD, the people the NYPD is sworn to serve and protect. The idea that police demand reflexive support from the city's Mayor against large segments of or even the majority of the people they're sworn to serve and protect simply makes no sense. The people of New York and the NYPD are two groups which by definition must coexist. They can do so well or poorly. But they cannot be rid of each other - even though segments of both groups seem to wish they could.

The conflicts over policing are ones that need to be worked out at the grass roots level in the hard but critical work of police-community relations and at the grander level of city politics. But what has been disturbing to me for weeks, well before this tragedy this weekend, is the way that at least the leadership of the police unions has basically gone to war against the Mayor over breaking even in small ways from lockstep backing of the police department in all cases and at all times. When we hear members of the NYPD union leadership talking about being forced to become a "wartime" police department, who exactly are they going to war with? WTF does that mean? And who is the enemy?

N.Y. / Region

After Shootings, Police Union Chief Deepens Rift With de Blasio

By AL BAKER and J. DAVID GOODMAN  

Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, on Monday at a Brooklyn memorial near where two police officers were killed. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

With his slicked-back hair, Queens accent and entourage of mostly white, male union lieutenants, Patrick J. Lynch moves through New York as the rough-around-the-edges, unapologetic labor leader for more than 22,000 street officers.

His public persona — greeting officers on the street and delivering speeches with a cadence that reaches for the Kennedyesque — ranks him among the most recognizable police officers in the city.

But behind the raffish facade is a shrewd tactician who, according to his allies and those who have faced off against him, has proved adept at negotiating deals when it fits his interests, and tangling with mayoral administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, when it has not. It has kept him at the helm of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association for 15 years, representing the bulk of the nation’s largest police force even as it bears less and less resemblance to his Irish Catholic roots.

His latest battle, though, far eclipses anything before.

Amid the furious national debate over race and policing, his pugilistic defense of police officers and his vitriolic critiques of Mayor Bill de Blasio have been seen across the country in the days since two police officers were killed in Brooklyn.

Patrick Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, blamed the killing of two New York police officers on Mayor Bill de Blasio, saying the blood "starts on the steps of city hall."

Video by Reuters on Publish Date December 23, 2014. Photo by Kevin Hagen for The New York Times.

"For years, Pat was not the only voice of support for police," said Al O’Leary, the union’s spokesman. "And now he is because there is no support for the police in City Hall."

Mr. Lynch, 51, declined requests for an interview and has lowered his profile since Saturday, when the officers were killed. But his last words that night still echo, the most provocative public statements in a career of fiery rhetoric.

"There is blood on many hands, from those that incited violence under the guise of protest to try to tear down what police officers did every day," Mr. Lynch said at the hospital where the mortally wounded officers had been taken. "That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor."

In laying the blame for the killings on the doorstep of a first-term liberal mayor, he also strained his relationship with William J. Bratton, the police commissioner, who had sought to bring the union chief back into the department’s embrace after years of estrangement.

　

The broadside by Mr. Lynch prompted former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a law-and-order Republican, to come to the defense of the mayor, a Democrat. "The blood is not on his hands," Mr. Giuliani said on Sunday in a radio interview.

Even before the fatal shootings, Mr. Lynch had been waging an increasingly pointed campaign against Mr. de Blasio over the mayor’s response to the wave of demonstrations that followed a Staten Island grand jury’s decision not indict a police officer in the death of Eric Garner.

Mr. Lynch urged officers to bar the mayor from their own funerals if they died in the line of duty. The effort, while publicly backed by only a tiny fraction, signaled the depths of discontent among the rank and file.

But Mr. Lynch’s invective in recent days deepened the rift between the police and the de Blasio administration, which had made repairing relations between officers and the city’s minority communities a priority.

　

Even before the hospital diatribe, Mr. Bratton had said that Mr. Lynch had gone "too far."

How widely shared that sentiment is and whether Mr. Lynch will win another term as union president next year are questions likely to animate discussions in the coming months. No formidable opponents have emerged, said John F. Driscoll, a retired captain who once led the Captain’s Endowment Association and remains in contact with many officers.

Mr. Driscoll said that for some, though, it might simply be a time for a new voice.

His members have been working without a contract since June 2010; negotiations broke down with the city and are headed to arbitration.

Both the mayor and police commissioner have suggested Mr. Lynch’s views do not reflect those of all officers.

Mr. Lynch entered the union’s leadership ranks in the early 1990s during a period of retrenchment for the union. He began as an officer in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where a sergeant suggested he should put up his name for a union position, saying "Hey, Lynch, you’ve got a big mouth, why don’t you run?"

In 1999, he became the youngest president in the union’s history.

By 2004, he was flexing his organizing muscle during contract negotiations, harrying Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg outside public events with large groups of off-duty officers whose chants and comments edged close enough to threats to draw the attention of the Police Department itself, which sent a video team to record the protests.

The union’s actions exposed a widening divide between Mr. Lynch and Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner at the time. Earlier that year an officer fatally shot an unarmed black man, Timothy Stansbury, on the roof of a Brooklyn housing project. Almost immediately, Mr. Kelly said the shooting appeared to be unjustified.

It might as well have been a declaration of war to Mr. Lynch, who lashed out. But that response did not sit with Mr. Kelly, a former Marine with little tolerance for dissent.

Mr. Lynch’s stout defense of officers is not new. He has done so when there is ample evidence of police misconduct — standing by the officers who killed Amadou Diallo in 1999 or defending one who shoved a bicyclist to the ground during a protest ride in 2008.

His face was so familiar to people in government that sensitive contract negotiations during the Bloomberg administration were held far from in City Hall.

"When Pat Lynch walks into the mayor’s side of City Hall, it gets noticed," said Edward Skyler, a former deputy mayor, who chose more private spaces like Gracie Mansion or a Gramercy coffee shop for contract discussions.

Mr. Lynch earns about $175,000 a year, roughly $76,000 from his job as an officer and $98,000 from the union, according to its most recent tax filing.

For much of the Bloomberg years, Mr. Kelly kept Mr. Lynch from most official activities at Police Headquarters.

That changed under Mr. Bratton, who invited Mr. Lynch and other union leaders to sit on the dais at official ceremonies, gave them office space inside Police Headquarters and consulted Mr. Lynch on officer morale, learning from him at the start of the year that it was "awful."

　

Instead, morale sank further, even as his chief complaint by the end of the Bloomberg administration, that officers had to fulfill quotas for stop-and-frisk activity, became moot. This year, recorded stops are at their lowest levels in a decade.

And Mr. Lynch’s megaphone appeared to grow only louder, despite his return to the department’s fold.

Officers, who said in interviews they felt the de Blasio administration did not have their back, now are haunted by the killings of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, who were ambushed in their patrol car on Saturday afternoon in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Mr. Lynch, nearly always dressed in a suit in public, wore his patrol uniform to visit the memorial in Brooklyn accompanied by one of his sons, also in uniform.

Like a politician, he adapts his language to his audience, at times using words, like describing arrested suspects as "mutts," that working-class officers can relate to.

But Mr. Lynch’s comments attacking the mayor come from a place of personal feeling, Mr. O’Leary, his spokesman, said. His youngest son is set to graduate from the Police Academy in January.

"It was gun and shield day the other day," said one longtime associate of Mr. Lynch, describing the moment when cadets are given their police hardware. "And he was there."

A Scourge Is Spreading. M.T.A.’s Cure? Dude, Close Your Legs.

By EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS NY TIMES

It is the bane of many female subway riders. It is a scourge tracked on blogs and on Twitter.

And it has a name almost as distasteful as the practice itself.

It is manspreading, the lay-it-all-out sitting style that more than a few men see as their inalienable underground right.

Now passengers who consider such inelegant male posture as infringing on their sensibilities — not to mention their share of subway space — have a new ally: the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Taking on manspreading for the first time, the authority is set to unveil public service ads that encourage men to share a little less of themselves in the city’s ever-crowded subways cars.

The targets of the campaign, those men who spread their legs wide, into a sort of V-shaped slouch, effectively occupying two, sometimes even three, seats are not hard to find. Whether they will heed the new ads is another question.

Riding the F train from Brooklyn to Manhattan on a recent afternoon, Fabio Panceiro, 20, was unapologetic about sitting with his legs spread apart.

Manspreading in action. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will address the practice as part a new ad campaign. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

"I’m not going to cross my legs like ladies do," he said. "I’m going to sit how I want to sit."

And what if Mr. Panceiro, an administrative assistant from Los Angeles, saw posters on the train asking him to close his legs? "I’d just laugh at the ad and hope that someone graffitis over it," he said.

For Kelley Rae O’Donnell, an actress who confronts manspreaders and tweets photos of them, her solitary shaming campaign now has the high-powered help of the transportation authority, whose ads will be plastered inside subway cars.

"It drives me crazy," she said of men who spread their legs. "I find myself glaring at them because it just seems so inconsiderate in this really crowded city."

When Ms. O’Donnell, who lives in Brooklyn and is in her 30s, asks men to move, she said, they rarely seem chastened: "I usually get grumbling or a complete refusal."

Kelley Rae O’Donnell, who confronts manspreaders and posts their photos online, captured an image of one on a train this month. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

The new ads — aimed at curbing rude behavior like manspreading and wearing large backpacks on crowded trains — are set to go up in the subways next month. They will all carry the slogan, "Courtesy Counts: Manners Make a Better Ride."

One of the posters is likely to be especially welcome to women — as well as to men who frown on manspreading: "Dude... Stop the Spread, Please" reads the caption next to an image of riders forced to stand as a man nearby sits so that he takes up two seats.

The campaign is the latest in a long line of courtesy-themed crusades by the authority going back to at least the 1940s. One such ad urged women annoyed by impolite male riders to, "Hit Him Again Lady, We Don’t Like Door-Blockers Either."

The new ads come as more riders are crowding onto the subways than at any time in recent history. In 2014, the system logged as many as 6.1 million riders on a single day, up from just under 5.1 million riders on the busiest day a decade ago. The city’s population, meanwhile, has swelled to more than 8.4 million people, pushing everyone closer and closer.

　

With crime no longer rampant on the subway, the campaign is the latest sign that other unwelcome behavior is getting attention.

Several blogs regularly highlight instances of manspreading where knees stretch several feet apart. On some sites, images of large objects like the Death Star from "Star Wars" have been added with Photoshop into the space between the splayed legs. While there are women who take up more than their share of space, the offenders are usually men.

One admitted manspreader, John Hubbard, sat with his legs wide apart on an F train as it traveled through Manhattan recently.

"It’s more comfortable," he said with a shrug.

Mr. Hubbard, 45, an engineer who lives in New Jersey, said he might move his leg, but not for just anyone. For an older person, he would. And for an attractive woman, he said, he definitely would.

Sherod Luscombe shook his head when he saw two men sitting with their legs spread on another train, taking up three seats between them. Mr. Luscombe, 58, a clinical social worker, said he thought the men should move, but he was not about to confront them.

"I’m not going to say, ‘Bro, there is a lady standing up right there. Cross your legs, young man,’ " he said.

Women have theories about why some men sit this way. Some believe it is just a matter of comfort and may not even be intentional. Others consider it an assertion of power, or worse.

Bridget Ellsworth, a 28-year-old music teacher, views manspreading as sexual harassment because some men engage in it near her even when the subway car is not packed.

"They could move over and spread out their legs all they want," she said, "but they’re squeezing next to me and doing it."

For men who think that sitting with their legs spread is socially acceptable, manners experts say it is not. Peter Post, the author of the book "Essential Manners for Men" and great-grandson of etiquette guru Emily Post, said the proper way for men to sit is with their legs parallel rather than in a V-shape.

"I’m baffled by people who do that kind of thing, who take other people’s space," he said.

Olof Hansson, a director of the Manhattan men’s spa John Allan’s, put it more succinctly. "A true gentleman doesn’t sit on the subway, he stands."

As for men who may worry that crossing their legs could hurt their virility, doctors say there is nothing to fear. A half-hour train ride with legs crossed might raise testicular temperatures, but not long enough to do any harm, said Dr. Marc Goldstein, director of the center for male reproductive medicine and microsurgery at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Philadelphia has a new etiquette campaign, too, with posters that say, "Dude It’s Rude... Two Seats — Really?"

But Kristin Geiger, a spokeswoman for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, said the campaign in the City of Brotherly Love is aimed at passengers with bags on seats, not people spreading their legs too far apart. Manspreading, she said, may be a "localized" problem in New York. "I don’t know of any complaints that have come through customer service about manspreading," she said. Transit officials in Chicago and Washington said the phenomenon is not a major concern for riders in those cities either.

In New York, the transportation authority went back and forth about what tone to take when tackling the topic, said Paul Fleuranges, the authority’s senior director for corporate and internal communications. Officials knew it could be ripe for parody on late night television and did not want their approach to be too snarky. But Mr. Fleuranges said he knew that the ads had to speak directly to the spreaders.

"I had them add the dude part," he said, "because I think, ‘Dude, really?’ "