Politics

NYC Mayor Takes New Tack After Latest Grand Jury Decision

Published

10 years ago

February 18, 2015

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, center, address Police Academy graduates during their graduation ceremony, Monday June 30,2014 at Madison Square Garden in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

JONATHAN LEMIRE, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Eric Garner and Akai Gurley were black men killed by New York City police officers. Although both deaths provoked anger in the city’s minority communities and renewed debate about policing in the nation’s largest city, the grand juries in each case brought different outcomes, with one officer indicted, one not.

And there was another striking difference: the public reactions from Mayor Bill de Blasio.

De Blasio was emotional and pained in December after a grand jury declined to indict an officer for placing Garner in a fatal chokehold, but he was cool and restrained last week when the officer who shot Gurley in a darkened stairwell was charged with manslaughter. That measured response may have helped the mayor maintain the uneasy truce he has struck with a police force that recently rebelled against him.

“The change in strategy implies the mayor may be trying to avoid fallout similar to the prior incident,” said Costas Panagopoulos, a Fordham University political science professor. “If his previous response was judged to be problematic, the mayor may be learning from what he perceives to be mistakes.”

Garner’s death last July was captured on cellphone video shown around the world. It included his repeated cries of “I can’t breathe!” after Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who is white, wrapped Garner in a chokehold. Police maintain it was a legal takedown maneuver.

When the grand jury on Staten Island, the city’s only majority white borough, declined to indict Pantaleo on Dec. 3, it reignited a rage that had been simmering since a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, declined to charge a white officer in the shooting death of Michael Brown, a black unarmed 18-year-old.

The moment was precarious for de Blasio, who enjoyed the support of the city’s African-American community and centered his administration on mending relations between the nation’s largest police force and the communities of color.

With protests breaking out across the city, he traveled that night to a small church on Staten Island where the Garner family worshipped and addressed the moment by saying he understood black families’ despair, framing it in the context of his own biracial teenage son.

“I’ve had to worry over the years, (my wife) Chirlane has had to worry: Is Dante safe each night?” he said. “And not just from some of the painful realities of crime and violence in some of our neighborhoods but safe from the very people they want to have faith in as their protectors.”

Two weeks later, when a man who had ranted online about Garner and Brown killed two city police officers, de Blasio’s words were held against him by police union leaders, who blamed him for creating an anti-New York Police Department sentiment they believe led to the killings. Patrick Lynch, head of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, said the mayor had “blood on his hands,” and officers turned their backs to de Blasio repeatedly.

After weeks of tension, the rift faded, in part because public opinion turned against the police as de Blasio took the high road, largely refusing to criticize the union leaders.

That peace was endangered Feb. 10 when a Brooklyn grand jury indicted Officer Peter Liang, who is Asian-American, for shooting Gurley in a housing project stairwell. As minority activists applauded the indictment, police union leaders, who had called the shooting accidental, were quick to urge that Liang receive a fair day in court.

With his relations with police again in the spotlight, de Blasio took a very different tack than he did two months prior.

Instead of an emotional speech, his press office put out a three-sentence statement in which the mayor “urged everyone to respect the judicial process as it unfolds.”

The next day, de Blasio faced reporters and was careful not to say anything that could appear to antagonize the police or share in any satisfaction that minority communities may have felt about the indictment. He again deferred to the judicial process, warned against comparing the two cases and noted that the Garner case was particularly painful “because people watched every second of his death.”

His aides dismissed the notion that de Blasio changed tactics because he was second-guessing his comments after Garner’s death.

“He calibrates according to context and circumstances while always steadfast to the core principles of public safety and reform,” Peter Ragone, a senior adviser to de Blasio, said Monday.

The police unions, to this point, have declined to comment further. Liang could face up to 15 years in prison.

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Related Topics:Akai Gurley bill de blasio Eric Garner nypd police brutality

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Activism

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Published

6 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”

With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”

He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”

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Activism

MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

Published

6 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.