The Globalist | De Blasio Vs. a Renegade Police Department

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This article was originally published in The Globalist.

In recent weeks, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has seen hundreds of police officers turn their backs on him at two funerals for two fallen comrades.

The city’s police force – which is the nation’s largest by a factor of three and is typically known by the shorthand “NYPD” – has also dramatically scaled back their arrest rate and policing activities on the instructions of their union. They have even demanded his resignation.

Even before tensions reached a fever pitch with the deaths of the officers and the recent protests over police brutality and racism, relations had been strained between the NYPD and the mayor.

In November 2013, de Blasio, who is white himself but has two biracial children, was elected mayor on a platform to end the controversial “stop-and-frisk” policing tactic that has disproportionately targeted racial minorities in the city.

The policy has also been deemed an unconstitutional search-and-seizure by a federal judge. De Blasio’s opposition to the policy vaulted him first to the Democratic Party nomination in a big field, and then to a landslide 72% victory in the general election.

In most major democratically governed cities (or countries) around the world, that would be a clear mandate for implementing reforms to the police. Confoundingly, that is not so in a U.S. city – and certainly not in New York City.

There, instead, the police form an intractable deep state that vigorously resists and publicly denounces any effort by its elected superiors to assert democratic control.

Bloomberg’s Army

In November 2011, while still mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg delivered the now-notorious line: “I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world.”

This speech occurred shortly after the NYPD’s heavy-handed breakup of the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park, and it struck a nerve for many Americans concerned with the militarization of U.S. law enforcement.

Indeed, the most alarming part was not so much Bloomberg’s braggadocio and arrogance, but rather that the comparison seemed more accurate than he himself likely intended. His other remarks made clear he fancied himself chief of a sovereign state-within-a-state – New York City within the United States.

The real state-within-a-state

The recent “mutiny” by the NYPD against Mayor de Blasio – from public displays of disrespect to unilateral work slowdowns – has underscored, however, that the real state-within-a-state is New York City’s police force itself.

Under Bloomberg and his very pro-cop predecessor Rudy Giuliani, the NYPD served administrations that did not challenge its authority or refuse requests to extend its authority and mandate. Thus, the elected leadership never faced opposition from that “seventh biggest army.”

Bill de Blasio, on the other hand, is finding that – like the security forces of a third-world country – one dares not cross the Big Apple’s big army. In that respect, he is learning a lesson the city’s first African-American Mayor, David Dinkins, learned the hard way in September 1992.

Back then, 4,000 off-duty officers stormed barricades around City Hall, while their uniformed comrades watched gleefully, during a police riot against Mayor Dinkins’ proposal for an “independent civilian agency” to monitor police misconduct.

Ironically, Dinkins had actually dramatically expanded the city’s police force.
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Chris Christie’s latest scandal involves EZ Passes

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Remember how Christie still believes he’s going to run for president and have a shot? New scandal discovered:

On Tuesday, the U.S. Attorney in New Jersey issued a subpoena to members of the state legislature seeking records related to Baroni’s testimony at a 2013 hearing on the Bridgegate scandal. At that hearing, Baroni disclosed that he possessed E-ZPass customer data showing the traffic histories of constituents of state lawmakers who were interrogating him. Experts tell IBTimes that the disclosure of E-ZPass records appears to have violated state law protecting the privacy of drivers and also raises serious questions about the degree to which government agencies can keep tabs on the comings and goings of citizens.

 
Do read the full thing. It’s another impressive insight into the constant abuses of power and intimidation that have been hallmarks of the full Christie administration.

chris-christie

The NYPD: America’s Secret Police

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Misconduct by the NYPD (with or without the apparently irrelevant backing of the law, based on their recent disrespect for their elected leader) extends from the individual level – stop-and-frisk encounters or the chokehold killing of Eric Garner – to the systemic and massive.

As a reminder: It took until April 2014 for the NYPD to shutter a terrifying surveillance program against Muslim communities, which was established after the 9/11 attacks.

That program not only sent undercover spies to Muslim neighborhoods in the city to track ordinary New Yorkers going about their daily lives, but it extended across the entire northeastern United States – well beyond the bounds of New York City.

The program was advised by the CIA (see previous link) but acted without the knowledge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In true Orwell fashion, it was named the “Demographics Unit.”

Such “secret police” behavior – down to the inscrutably euphemistic name – is like something out of Tsarist Russia.

Such programs — or indeed national security in general — are not supposed to be the role of a municipal police force. Activities by the NYPD in the past decade and a half suit the secret police forces of a 19th century reactionary monarch in Europe far more than a 21st century American liberal democracy.

Flag of the New York City Police Department

Flag of the New York City Police Department

2,000 “feared dead” in raids by Boko Haram in NE Nigeria

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Last weekend, I posted a story on Boko Haram’s rout of a multi-national force and capture of a Nigerian base in the country’s northeast:

Nigeria’s strategically significant military base at Baga, near the border of Chad, fell to Boko Haram in a clear rout for the multi-national force stationed there, who apparently put up no resistance.

 
Some residents, who escaped the fall of the town and fled across Lake Chad and the national border, had reported at the time that Boko Haram had set the town of Baga on fire and was killing people indiscriminately. (Baga was previously also the site of a massacre by government counter-insurgency forces in 2013.)

The reports filtering out since then, about what happened next, are even more grim:

Boko Haram razed at least 16 villages in northern Nigeria, leaving 2,000 people unaccounted for and feared dead since Monday, Nigerian officials said Thursday.

It’s possible some of the missing are in hiding or are outside the country and uncounted (about 2,500 refugees crossed the border this week), but things look bleak on that possibility:

Borno state lawmaker Ahmed Khalifa told NBC News that “towns are just gone” and that the the villages along Lake Chad are “covered in bodies.” The village attacks reportedly began after militants seized a key military base and chased residents out of the area. After clearing the villages, they returned to kill survivors and burn down town structures.

 
TIME magazine reports this alarming development:

Boko Haram […] controls an estimated 30-35,000 square kilometers, roughly the same amount of terrain as Syria and Iraq’s Islamic State.

 
It’s pretty telling about U.S. priorities, over-reactions, and under-reactions in different parts of the world that the response to ISIS last year was sharply different — which is to say, not even on the same scale of magnitude — from the response to Boko Haram, even as they now control the same land area by size.

Mass executions by ISIS in Syria and Iraq have so far reportedly topped out at 700 people in a two week killing spree (although the total figures across incidents over the past year are significantly higher). If the civilian body count estimates coming out of north Borno state in northeast Nigeria prove correct, Boko Haram will have already significantly exceeded the August 2014 massacres by ISIS.

Keep in mind, however, that public official/government reports on the insurgency in Nigeria have often proven greatly exaggerated or altogether false, and information coming out of the Baga area is likely to be very sketchy at best right now. At minimum, though, the intensity and frequency of Boko Haram’s attacks on military and civilian targets (especially near the border regions) appear to be picking up steam.

Added January 9 at 7:33 PM ET: — Report from Amnesty International via the AP:

Hundreds of bodies — too many to count — remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International suggested Friday is the “deadliest massacre” in the history of Boko Haram.
[…]
District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents.

“The human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was enormous,” Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed civilians in a defense group that fights Boko Haram, told The Associated Press.

He said the civilian [self-defense] fighters gave up on trying to count all the bodies. “No one could attend to the corpses and even the seriously injured ones who may have died by now,” Gava said.

 

Also: The BBC reports that nearby Niger’s troops will no longer be participating in the multi-national force in Borno state due to the deteriorating security situation (which seems a bit counter-intuitive since they’re supposed to be helping with that exact problem):

Soldiers from Niger had been there [at Baga base] but were not present when it was attacked.

Niger Foreign Minister Mohamed Bazoum told the BBC Hausa service: “We have 50 soldiers there and decided to withdraw them after Boko Haram captured Malamfatori town in October and continued to operate in the area with impunity.

“As you know, Baga is under [the control of] Boko Haram terrorists and unless the town is recaptured from them, we will not send back our troops.

 

Still image (via AFP) from a Boko Haram video communiqué received October 31, 2014.

Still image (via AFP) from a Boko Haram video communiqué received October 31, 2014.

Other police mutinies in U.S. history: Mississippi

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As the NYPD turns its back on its elected government and unilaterally refuses to enforce the law, let’s look back at another mutinous, anti-democratic police force that refused to uphold the law — Mississippi’s secret police.

For nearly two decades following the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling against school segregation, a secret state-level agency called the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission conducted surveillance on “subversive individuals and organizations that advocate civil disobedience” – i.e. civil rights activists.

Their primary mission was to resist the implementation of Federal government orders and laws on desegregation in Mississippi. This included aiding county governments in preventing African-Americans from registering to vote. Worse, their surveillance efforts have also been linked to the infamous lynching murders of three civil rights workers in 1964.

You can learn more about this secret police force from the Mississippi Department of Archives.

Flag of the State of Mississippi

Flag of the State of Mississippi

#BlackLivesMatter means just that, not that police lives don’t

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It shouldn’t need to be said that Black lives matter. If, in the US, all men (and women) are created equal, then it should be a given that Black people’s lives hold just as much value as any other life in this country. However, it seems that with each passing week it’s becoming more and more evident to the public eye that this isn’t the case.

With the murder of Mike Brown – and the subsequent actions by police after – many in Ferguson, Missouri were fed up and decided to take action. Soon after, other cities joined in protest, adding the names of those who had been killed in each location to a long list of Black and Brown people who’d been killed in recent months and years, including Eric Garner’s. All of them by the police who are supposed to serve and protect them.

Yet it seems that many people think that acknowledging the value of Black life — i.e. that #BlackLivesMatter — is in opposition to the lives of the police. That they are somehow mutually exclusive. In many places “pro-police” counter-protests have popped up with the slogan “Blue Lives Matter.”

The NYPD even went on an unofficial protest after they were upset to hear that Mayor Bill de Blasio advised his son (who is Black/biracial) to be careful in his interactions with the police. They say de Blasio teaching his son this fuels distrust in the police and could endanger their lives — and that it indirectly leads to incidents like the shooting of the two NYPD officers that happened in December.

In protest, they stopped making minor arrests, and began instead to make arrests or issue summonses only when absolutely necessary, meaning things like parking violations won’t result in confrontations with police. It also potentially means no Stop-And-Frisk, which Mayor de Blasio hadn’t ended completely, despite that being a central campaign promise.

It seems odd (read: racist) that the idea of valuing Black life is automatically thought of as devaluing the lives of police officers. It seems odder still that while police counter the main protests with the contention that “Blue Lives Matter,” they ignore the fact that many Black police officers – who should also count as “Blue” lives – often feel the brunt of racial profiling done by their own co-workers.

In an additional irony, in their counter-protest, the NYPD seems to have forgotten that Eric Garner’s death resulted from an unnecessary arrest for a minor purported violation. Garner was approached by the NYPD for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, which certainly didn’t warrant the use of force in the attempted arrest. So perhaps this unofficial protest has done more good than the harm they expected. Either way, when people say “Black Lives Matter” what they mean is Black lives matter. They don’t mean that anyone else’s lives matter less. Hopefully soon police forces across the country will realize this too.

Police Chiefs in at least two cities seem to recognize the meaning behind these protests. In Nashville, Police Chief Steve Anderson responded to a message left on the police departments website challenging the commenter’s idea of what constitutes a the city being safe, and expressing respect for the rights of the protesters in Nashville. In Pittsburgh, Police Chief Cameron McLay showed his support for protesters with a sign pledging to “challenge racism at work.” Both are White.

In the latter case, the response to this chief’s display of solidarity with the community has gotten negative attention from the president of the police union in Pittsburgh who says the chief’s stance makes the police force look “corrupt and racist.” Chief McLay stood by the message on the sign.

Whether they realize it or not, some police seem to have stumbled onto the solution to their constant and fatal confrontations with Black people. When people are treated as people and not criminals, crime rates don’t increase, even as the people are policed less. When protesters are treated with respect, there is less likely to be a violent confrontation between them and the police. When Black lives are given the value they deserve, the relationship between them and the police improves.

Things to think about as Sri Lanka votes

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Early presidential elections in Sri Lanka — between the incumbent (increasingly dictatorial) president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and his former Health Minister, Maithripala Sirisena — have unexpectedly become a nail-biter race.

Some of the Western coverage has focused on the frivolous and bizarre. (For example, the New York Times’s “As Vote Nears, Astrologer for Sri Lanka’s President Faces Ultimate Test of His Skills”.) Some has focused on the president’s troubling alliance with extremist Buddhist/Sinhalese nationalism.

But most importantly, there are reflections on President Rajapaksa’s appalling war crimes during his decisive but extremely violent conclusion to Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war:

By the first few months of 2009, with the [Tamil] Tigers in hopeless retreat, the government declared a series of what they called “no fire zones”, into which they encouraged as many as 400,000 Tamil civilians to gather “for their own safety”.

Government forces then relentlessly shelled these zones and, as a later UN report concluded, systematically denied them food and humanitarian supplies. The UN estimates that there were “as many as 40,000 civilian deaths in a matter of weeks, most as a result of government shelling. There was also a World Bank estimate that 100,000 civilians were missing after the war.

 
It takes a special kind of monster to urge civilians into safe zones and then direct military to shell those zones.

President and Mrs. Obama in an official photo with President and Mrs. Rajapaksa at the September 2013 UN General Assembly in New York. (White House Photo)

President and Mrs. Obama in an official photo with President and Mrs. Rajapaksa at the September 2013 UN General Assembly in New York. (White House Photo)