http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-new-york-tensions-between-police-and-mayor-bill-de-blasio-boil-over-after-killings/2014/12/21/7bc5a746-892a-11e4-8ff4-fb93129c9c8b_story.html?hpid=z1By Karen Tumulty December 21 at 5:01 PM
Tensions between New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city’s police — which boiled over in the wake of the assassination-style slayings of two officers Saturday — have been simmering since the mayor’s 2013 campaign and represent a sharp turn from the close alliance between the city’s mayors and law enforcement over the past two decades.
Recriminations against de Blasio began within hours of the news that the officers had been shot at point-blank range as they sat in their patrol car near a housing project in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn — and that the gunman had been motivated to kill them as retribution for the black men whose deaths at the hands of police in New York City and Ferguson, Mo., have sparked protests around the country.
A video of the arrival of de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton at the hospital where officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos had been taken showed dozens of police officers silently turning their backs.
“There’s blood on many hands tonight,” Patrick Lynch, president of the largest police union, said late Saturday. “Those that incited violence on the street in the guise of protest, that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did every day. We tried to warn it must not go on, it shouldn’t be tolerated. That blood on the hands starts at the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor.”
Although New York is a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 6 to 1, de Blasio is its first Democratic mayor in 20 years and his stewardship of the city is being watched nationally as a test of unabashedly liberal leadership. After his landslide victory, he declared, “Make no mistake. The people of this city have chosen a progressive path. And tonight we set forth on it together, as one city.”
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