De Blasio's Fateful Anti-Cop Slander

Until he takes it back, the city risks sliding back into disorder

Mayor de Blasio met with union leaders Tuesday in an effort to mend his rift with police officers. We're told the meeting was respectful.

The gesture will be meaningless unless the mayor publicly repudiates his dangerous calumny of the police.

Following the nonindictment of Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the lethal arrest of Eric Garner last July, de Blasio said that Garner's death and the grand jury's failure to indict sprung from "not years of racism . . . , or decades of racism, but centuries of racism." The mayor worries "every night," he said, about the "dangers" his biracial son, Dante, may face from "officers who are paid to protect him."

In other words, de Blasio thinks that his son is at risk of injury or death from an NYPD officer every time he steps outside at night. And he sees the officers who tried to arrest a resisting Garner as the culmination of centuries of racism, even though the shopkeepers in the area who had been urging the police to clear up lawlessness were mostly minorities themselves.

It is impossible to overstate how inflammatory and ignorant de Blasio's statements are. De Blasio's pronouncements were merely a wordier version of the protest chants against "killer cops" and belonged to the national frenzy of cop-bashing that provoked the assassination of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.

Since those cop murders, de Blasio has been furiously back-pedaling. He called the NYPD the "greatest and finest police department on this Earth" at the Police Academy graduation on Monday, and said that "it takes a special kind of person to put their lives on the line for others."

But as long as de Blasio's earlier claims hang out there unretracted, the overcompensation is simply insulting. Both propositions cannot be true: Dante cannot be in daily "danger" from the NYPD because of his skin color, while at the same time the NYPD is the finest police department on Earth.

For nearly a year, the NYPD's top brass have been worried about losing the rank and file. Morale was already at risk from the superfluous new oversight bureaucracies that de Blasio demanded as a mayoral candidate. Worse, the Civilian Complaint Review Board has assumed new prosecutorial and sentencing powers, which it lacks the knowledge to use appropriately.

In early November, a high-ranking official spoke to me about the NYPD's fears: "The main thing we can't allow to happen is to lose control of the streetcorners."

That may already be occurring. The department managed to quell a 10% shooting spike in the first half of the year by throwing cops at hot spots over the summer. But in the past four weeks, shooting victims have surged 38% over the same period last yea r, while in the days since the assassination, cops have all but abandoned discretionary summons and arrest activity, as threats against them pour into the department.

If de Blasio wants to reverse this ominous slowdown, he must explicitly rebut his earlier slander of the NYPD. And he must stop glorifying the anti-NYPD protesters as crusaders against social and racial injustice.

The real injustice occurred decades ago, when police officers across the country ignored crime in black neighborhoods. Today, the NYPD devotes the majority of its resources and energy to saving lives in poor communities. Any "danger" that Dante de Blasio might face comes overwhelmingly from black criminals, not the police, de Blasio should acknowledge.

In 2013, criminals committed 1,103 shootings, wounding or killing 1,299 victims. NYPD officers, by contrast, fired their guns 40 times, despite having been dispatched 80,000 times to investigate weapons reports and having encountered guns and other weapons in more than 30,000 arrests.

That firearms discharge number is the lowest since the department began collecting data. The police injured 17 people and killed eight - again, a record low. Almost all those victims had extensive and serious criminal records; most had threatened the officer with deadly force.

Whites were far more likely to be shot by the police than blacks when their crime rates are taken into account.

Whites were 5% of all suspects shot by the police in 2013 though they committed only 2% of the city's shootings - a 250% disparity. Blacks were 75% of criminal shooters and 79% of police shooting victims - virtual parity.

De Blasio may be too narcissistic to take responsibility for his reckless errors. That leaves only Police Commissioner Bill Bratton to correct the record.

Yet Bratton has been curiously listless when it comes to defending his force. If he has presented data rebutting the lie that the NYPD poses a mortal risk to young black men, the press has not reported it.

Perhaps Bratton is preserving his political capital for a different fight.

But unless the mayor himself can convince cops that he will spread the truth about policing, the city's always fragile conquest of crime will be in severe jeopardy.

This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News