Bill de Blasio is showing his disrespect

There’s an old saying that it’s “better to be lucky than good,” but what if you are unlucky and bad?

That would describe Mayor Bill de Blasio, who in the span of a few hours went from defiant to deflated. He started out crowing and ended up eating crow.

The mayor emerged from hiding Monday to use the ­release of 2014 crime stats to heap more abuse on cops, saying a decline of 4.6 percent in major felonies meant he was right to demand both a “safe city” and a “fairer city.” He also blasted officers for turning their backs on him at Sunday’s funeral for Officer Wenjian Liu, calling them “disrespectful” and saying “it defies a lot of what we all feel is the right and decent thing to do.”

Hours later, he was at a Bronx hospital visiting two ­undercover cops wounded in a late-night shootout with armed robbers.

The roller-coaster day revealed the incoherence of de Blasio’s mayoralty. He claims lower crime justifies his anti-police agenda, but can’t resist throwing an elbow at the people who actually do the dangerous job. And when two officers are wounded, he praises their courage without any recognition of why so many of the Finest believe he has made the job even more dangerous.

The toxic tangle is growing worse, with data suggesting a widespread slowdown. Arrests and summonses are falling so steeply that there is no other reasonable explanation. Meanwhile, murders and other serious crimes jumped in the last two weeks of December, erasing some of the gains made throughout the year.

The mayor knew all of this when he spoke Monday, which makes his boasting and criticism especially unwise. He could have used the 2014 stats as a moment to turn the page and make a fresh start.

Instead, he threw gasoline on the fire — and has the nerve to accuse cops of disrespect. Then he has to go visit the wounded and comfort their families in an emergency.

The upshot is that de Blasio still doesn’t understand what it means to be mayor and how to use his power for the good of all New Yorkers. He’s stuck in a combative, campaign mindset, trying to win an argument rather than govern effectively.

It’s a fool’s errand because he can’t win the argument. If he did, it would destroy the city.

To break the spirit of the NYPD and make it complicit in his radical agenda, he’d have to purge the department of proven leaders and younger officers who participated in the successful two-decade war against crime. He’d have to erase the institutional memory of preventive policing and wipe the history books clean of the heroes who gave their all, and sometimes their lives, to make New York safe.

Meanwhile, the pols and left-wing pundits who echo the mayor in pouring abuse on the cops are lost in the fog de Blasio created. The mayor holds all the cards and the bully pulpit, while it’s the cops who put their lives on the line.

They and their families have bet the biggest stakes, and deserve an extra measure of understanding. The fact that they expressed their anger at funerals for two assassinated fellow officers shows how deeply their estrangement runs.

Remember, too, the slowdown began after de Blasio refused opportunities to cool a simmering battle that goes back to scurrilous charges he made in the 2013 campaign. Even at the meeting he called to try to heal the breach, he dug in his heels, defended the protesters despite the widespread abuse of and threats against cops, and offered nothing that could remotely be described as conciliatory. An olive branch might have been the first step to a solution.

At this point, it is hard to be optimistic. Fundamentally, de Blasio makes it clear on many issues that he views his election as a blank check, and feels no need to represent the 7.7 million people who did not vote for him or those who don’t agree with him.

That’s the nut of the problem. The real disrespect is that the mayor is failing to do his duty to end the war on cops. After all, he started it.

http://nypost.com/2015/01/06/bill-de-blasio-is-showing-his-disrespect/

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/01/de_blasios_wife_wore_jeans_to_officer_lius_funeral.html