NYC mayor to meet with police unions

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) will meet with all five New York police unions on Tuesday in an effort to mend relations during a tense time with the New York Police Department. 

De Blasio will meet privately with leaders of the Captains Endowment Association, Lieutenants Benevolent Association, Sergeants Benevolent Association, Detectives’ Endowment Association and Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association on Tuesday.

The meeting comes a day after getting a mixed reception, including boos, from an audience attending the graduation ceremony for the city’s newest crop of police officers. It was the most recent in a string of public displays of disrespect for the mayor that police view as too empathetic to those protesting officer-involved killings of unarmed black men. 

{mosads}“It takes a special kind of person to put their lives on the line for others, to stare down the danger,” de Blasio told the graduates at New York’s Madison Square Garden, taking time during his speech to mourn Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, the two officers gunned down in their patrol car in Brooklyn earlier this month.

The officers were apparently killed in retribution for the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in Staten Island. Separate grand juries declined to indict the white officers involved in the deaths of both unarmed black men.

The head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, one of the police unions de Blasio is set to meet with, suggested the mayor had “blood” on his hands following the ambush killing of the two NYPD officers. 

Many officers turned their backs on de Blasio as he spoke during the funeral for the slain officers over the weekend.

New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, who along with senior NYPD leaders is scheduled to attend Tuesday’s meeting with de Blasio and the police unions, called the action “very inappropriate.”

Speaking after de Blasio on Monday, Bratton acknowledged the police department, city and country face a “difficult time.”

“We will work through it; we always do. We will resolve our differences and even while we do that, we will keep this city safe,” he said.