Apparently believing his own angry, divisive rhetoric hasn’t done the trick, Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch has moved into calling on cops to split New York into their friends and their enemies.
A recording of Lynch addressing PBA delegates reveals that he is also pointing his members toward an unlawful rule-book slowdown as a tactic in warring with Mayor de Blasio.
“If we won’t get support when we do our jobs, if we’re going to get hurt for doing what’s right, then we’re going to do it the way they want it. Let me be perfectly clear. We will use extreme discretion in every encounter,” Lynch said, adding:
“Our friends, we’re courteous to them. Our enemies, extreme discretion. The rules are made by them to hurt you. Well, now we’ll use those rules to protect us.”
He went on: “There’s a book they make for us where, if you carried it with you, you won’t need to go to the gym. Every time there’s a problem, they tell us what we can’t do. They tell us what we shouldn’t do. They never tell us what we can do.
“We’re going to take that book, their rules, and we’re going to protect ourselves, because they won’t. We will do it the way they want us to do it. We will do it with their stupid rules, even the ones that don’t work.”
A tape of his remarks, not intended for public consumption, was obtained by the website Capital New York.
Cannily, Lynch skirted an outright call to break the Taylor Law with a job action, enabling his spokesman to say with a straight face, “The message I got was do the job right, do the job according to the rules, which is good advice anytime.”
Lynch’s members know better. He has made clear that he believes de Blasio has slandered cops as racist and stacked the deck against them with increased departmental oversight.
Making plain that he places de Blasio among those enemies, he declared to delegates:
“He is not running the city of New York. He thinks he’s running a f—–g revolution.”
Lynch’s fulminations about legitimate policy differences have been destructively overheated. His call on cops to disinvite de Blasio and Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito from their funerals in the event they are killed in the line of duty drew a rebuke from Timothy Cardinal Dolan.
That said, tarring a politician before the public while negotiating a labor contract is part of the game. (City voters disapprove of de Blasio’s handling of police-community relations by 56% to 36%, according to the Quinnipiac poll.)
But urging courtesy for “our friends” and “extreme discretion” for “our enemies” while on the job suggests two standards of enforcement in a city that counts on the police for equal protection.
