Bratton defends city, NYPD after shootings
The assassination of two New York cops has reopened a debate about how a police department, often under fierce political strains, can deal with a civilian authority of elected officials.
New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton took to the airways Tuesday to defend his department as some disgruntled police and Mayor Bill de Blasio called a truce in their battle over responsibility for the shootings and recent anti-police protests to allow New York to mourn its dead.
“We’re in a very difficult place at the moment,” Bratton said on “CBS This Morning,” adding, “in the sense of officers’ feelings about the demonstrations, about the anti-police mood that seems to be sweeping the country of late, and it’s not easy being a cop in America today, the dangers that still exist despite crime having gone down fairly dramatically over the last 20 years.”
Bratton, whose city is mourning the weekend shootings of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, defended both his department and the man who rehired him, De Blasio, whose standing with police has never been high and has ebbed in the last year as programs such as stop-and-frisk were ended.
“It’s a tough job, as we’ve seen, in some instances, a thankless job,” Bratton said. “Despite that, I’ll speak for my city — they’ve done a remarkable job, they’re keeping crime down, they’ve been restrained when face-to-face with demonstrators, you know, ‘Kill the cops’ and the language that’s directed at them.”
Bratton was referring to a series of demonstrations that began when a grand jury decided not to indict a Ferguson police officer in the shooting of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown. The demonstrations accelerated when a Staten Island grand jury late last month decided not to indict a New York officer who used a chokehold to subdue Eric Garner, an unarmed African-American man. Garner died after the confrontation.
Meanwhile, the city continued to prepare for the funerals set to begin to this weekend.
