The record for the most notorious radio appearance made by a New York City mayor has long been held by Rudy Giuliani, who, on his weekly WABC call-in show, berated a ferret-loving constituent for showing an “excessive concern with little weasels” and advised him to seek psychiatric help. The baton has now been passed. On Friday morning, Mayor Bill de Blasio called in to the weekly “Ask the Mayor” segment on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.” It had been eleven days since George Floyd was killed, in Minneapolis, by a policeman’s knee to the neck, and a week since New Yorkers began marching, en masse, to protest police brutality. Four days earlier, de Blasio instituted a nightly curfew—first set at 11 P.M., then moved to eight—in response to the looting of stores in midtown, SoHo, and on Fordham Road, in the Bronx. Since then, damage to property has been minimal, but the same can’t be said of damage to bodies. Each evening brings new cell-phone footage to Twitter of protesters corralled and barricaded, shoved to the ground by police in riot gear and clubbed with nightsticks, and barraged with pepper spray and tear gas. The police have arrested journalists; they gassed and cuffed the state senator Zellnor Myrie. “The city has a problem of protests against too much police violence being met with too much police violence,” Lehrer began on Friday morning. “Do you accept the premise?” “No,” de Blasio replied, testily. The tone was set.
What followed was a thirty-minute performance of defensiveness, denial, and bizarre false equivalence. It’s not that de Blasio entirely denied reality. He gestured to it in bromides. “I accept the premise only in this way, that I think people are deeply hurt. There’s an anger, there’s a pain, over what’s wrong in policing in America and in New York City that we have to fix,” he told Lehrer. When a caller from Manhattan reported seeing police officers without face coverings, de Blasio agreed that this was a problem, and added, “What bothers me even more is reports of officers covering their badge number or their name up and not turning on their body camera when they should.” His daughter, Chiara, he said, had witnessed a protest crowd calling for a police officer to turn on his body camera; the officer did not comply. (He didn’t mention that, after Chiara was arrested at a protest, the Sergeants Benevolent Association—the same union that, this past February, announced that the N.Y.P.D. was “declaring war” on the Mayor—tweeted out an image of her police report, in what was, evidently, a targeted doxing attempt, exposing personal information that included her address and driver’s-license number.)
But these were generalities, without specific proposals for remedy. De Blasio’s current strategy seems to be to promise that individual officers will be held accountable for individual misdeeds, though given that he refused to call for the dismissal of Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who killed Eric Garner, with a chokehold, in 2014, it’s not exactly clear what kind of accountability he has in mind. On Saturday morning, de Blasio tweeted a statement from the police commissioner, Dermot Shea, announcing the suspension of two officers, one who was caught on camera pushing a woman to the ground, and one who had pulled down a protester’s face mask to blast him with pepper spray. Time and again, in the Lehrer interview, de Blasio stressed that, from what he had seen, the majority of protests had been peaceful, and peacefully policed. That, however, does not take into account the remarkable show of force that the N.Y.P.D. has mustered for the moment: the caravans of police cars, two dozen strong, that trail protesters as they march in the early evening, dousing whole avenues in their flashing lights; the officers who follow on foot, clutching their batons, as if waiting for the slightest provocation to go into action; the helicopters that hover, siege-style, over residential neighborhoods, so loud as to render thought, and sleep, impossible.
Lehrer asked the Mayor to respond to the violence in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx on Thursday night, when police “kettled,” or corralled, protesters before going in for arrests. The scene, brutal and chaotic, was well documented by protesters and journalists, including the Gothamist reporter Jake Offenhartz. On Offenhartz’s Twitter feed, you can see a man—who is white—approaching officers with his hands in the air, and getting shoved to the ground, and another man who describes witnessing a woman getting her head “bashed in.” You can see a video clip of China Williams, a black man in a white T-shirt, with his hands tied in plastic handcuffs behind his back, waiting in line to be loaded onto a corrections bus, shouting that he is a janitor who got “bum-rushed” by the police while leaving work in a nearby building. What did de Blasio make of all of this? Not much. “There was explicit warning in the case of that gathering in the Bronx,” he said, echoing Shea. “Groups organizing that event advertised their desire to do violence and create conflict.”
Lehrer again pressed the point. Wasn’t there a way to distinguish between looters and peaceful protesters? Didn’t kettling push people closer together than they needed to be, given that the city is still recovering from the coronavirus pandemic? “Respectfully, I’m not hearing objectivity in your question,” de Blasio said. “Brian, I don’t know what your reporters are telling you,” he said, when Lehrer asked whether de Blasio’s policy called for the police to arrest people who remained outside past curfew. That blame-the-press response, with its Trumpy intonations of “fake news,” coupled with the Mayor’s insistence that New Yorkers should not believe their own eyes, should give major pause to his supporters—if there are any left. On Wednesday, two hundred and thirty current and former members of de Blasio’s staff signed an open letter calling for “radical change from the Mayor, who is on the brink of losing all legitimacy in the eyes of New Yorkers.”
This has been an extraordinary spring in New York City. It began, in early March, with the Mayor urging New Yorkers to go about their ordinary business without fear of catching or spreading the coronavirus. (Two weeks later, with the city shut down and residents huddled in terror at home, de Blasio appeared at his beloved Park Slope Y.M.C.A., twelve miles from his residence at Gracie Mansion, for one last workout.) It continued as the city became the epicenter of the pandemic, the urban soundtrack distilled to one long ambulance wail. We know who has been hit hardest in this bombarded city: residents of poor and working-class neighborhoods, black and Latinx New Yorkers who have officially been deemed “essential” yet treated as anything but. To see the city transform, essentially overnight, from a ghost town to one exploding with life and righteous anger has been overwhelming, in every sense. It is frightening to think that after so much sacrifice to keep the virus at bay, we may be helping to usher it back in. But it is galvanizing, and beautiful, to feel united with our neighbors in a new way: to come together not for the sake of pleasure but for shared purpose. “People will know in their hearts when things have been made right,” de Blasio said, with grating folksiness, at a press conference on Friday morning, before he went on the radio. Leave the heart out of it. Let us know by leaving our bodies intact instead.
But back to Brian. With his good humor, intelligence, and equanimity, he has been a balm through this awful time. One of the routine pleasures of his show is hearing New Yorkers call in from across the city—I believe that he may be the only journalist in the country who is equally respected by members of the left and the right—and Friday was no exception. Listeners got to hear from callers like Patrick from Yorkville, who told the Mayor that he had seen the police “turn into werewolves at eight,” and Mayat, who was furious about footage of police vans plowing into protesters. (“Sometimes what we see with our own eyes is the whole story and that means fast investigation and fast action,” de Blasio told her. “Sometimes it’s not the whole story. Sometimes there is more going on than a short video shows.”) Another caller, Mike from the Lower East Side, said that he worked for H.P.D., the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which is responsible for developing affordable housing . “H.P.D. gets nineteen cents for every dollar that the N.Y.P.D. gets,” he said. (The N.Y.P.D. number includes the Department of Correction.) “I’m just wondering, is H.P.D. a fifth as important as the N.Y.P.D.?”
