New York City’s top cop has no problem with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s debate remarks about teaching his biracial son to “protect” himself from the NYPD – or with son, Dante, writing in USA Today that he felt “fear” of the police.
“What a father says to his son, that’s in their family,” NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill said Tuesday.
“What Dante wrote, that’s his experience.”
O’Neill also said that while the NYPD wasn’t always “people’s favorite people,” he defended it as “the best police department in the nation.”
“I’ll never stand up here and say we’re perfect,” O’Neill said during an unrelated news conference at One Police Plaza.
Click Here: watford fc shirt
“But from what I’m seeing at my level, and I talk to cops all the time – we talked to hundreds of them at the Pride parade who worked on average about 20 hours each – they love what they do and they know that their job is to fight crime and to keep New Yorkers safe.”
During Wednesday’s Democratic presidential primary debate, De Blasio reignited a feud with the NYPD’s biggest union when he discussed having held “very, very serious talks with my son, Dante, about how to protect himself in the streets of our city…because there have been too many tragedies between young men and our police.”
see also
PBA chief slams de Blasio over anti-police rhetoric at debate
The head of the NYPD’s biggest union slammed Mayor Bill…
In 2014, similar comments led thousands of cops to turn their backs on the mayor at the funerals for a pair of cops, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, who were gunned down without warning while sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn.
Following the debate, Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch accused de Blasio of having “learned nothing over the past six years about the extremely damaging impact of anti-police rhetoric on both cops and the communities we serve.”
In the wake of that criticism, USA Today published a Monday op-ed by Dante, 21, in which he defended his dad’s warnings to him and recalled feeling “fear” in San Francisco three years ago when a police car approached as he was trying to let himself into a friend’s house at 1 a.m.
The head of the NYPD sergeants union, Ed Mullins, said: “I actually feel sorry for Commissioner O’Neill.”
“He tells the city how good of a job he has done making change with community policing in communities of color in New York City and the mayor tells the nation little has been done in policing communities of color,” Mullins said.
0 thoughts on “O’Neill OK with de Blasio’s debate comments, son Dante’s op-ed”