PBA’s Patrick Lynch denounces NYC Mayor de Blasio for “throwing cops under the bus,” while celebrating the grand jury verdicts, especially in the Eric Garner case. (YouTube screen grab)
By Rob Kall, Editor, OpEd News
[dropcap]For the culture[/dropcap] that supports and defends criminality among police to change, the elements that maintain the culture must change. That means that the head of the “snake”– Pat Lynch has to go. Unions with mentalities that back up criminal police officers have to go.
Pat Lynch, the head of the largest NY Police union– PBA– has blamed Mayor Bill de Blasio and US Attorney General Eric Holder for the killings of two police officers, saying their blood is on de Blasio’s hands. It ends up that Lynch has attacked every one of the past six mayors of NYC.
Lynch is an attack dog. Lynch is the one who has the blood of two police officers on his hands. Lynch has the blood of Eric Garner on his hands.
The negative reaction to the recalcitrant cops who continue to circle the wagons professing sanctimony and innocence in the face of undeniable evidence to the contrary has been noted in many social media, including YouTube.
Lynch is a huge part of the problem with police who kill. As leader of a large union, that makes the union a major part of the problem.
The union is unquestioning in its support of bad cops. It protects and fights for bad cops– criminal, murdering cops.
In a press conference at PBA headquarters, PBA president Pat Lynch slammed Mayor de Blasio for “throwing New York City police officers under the bus” following a Staten Island grand jury’s decision not to indict P.O. Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner.
For the culture that supports and defends criminality among police to change, the elements that maintain the culture must change. That means that the head of the “snake”– Pat Lynch has to go. Unions with mentalities that back up criminal police officers have to go.
The right wingers (figures like Rudi Giuliani) who run cover for bad cops need to be called out again and again. That should be the job of the mainstream media. They could at least offer an equal voice to people protesting against police killings. [Of course, they rarely do.—Eds)
Until the police and their unions and supporters make it clear that they acknowledge that there ARE bad cops and they have to be held accountable, ALL police are going to get a bad rap that they don’t deserve.
As Rabbi Michael Lerner has said, until grand jury prosecutors start doing their jobs, THEY are putting good cops at risk. THEY are giving all cops a bad reputation. This should be an idea that gets more attention.
I hope there are some police officers who get it that Police union head Pat Lynch really does have blood on his hands, that every police union leader, ever prosecutor, every mayor, every pundit and politician who makes excuses for bad cops who kill is contributing to the murders of cops.
So speak out. Tell the police you see on the street that if they are honest that they have to police their own, that the old ways are bad for police, bad for America. And since the USA sets a very bad example that will be cited by police all over the world. A bad cop in NYC or Ferguson can lead to victims in every continent on the planet.
But if you do speak to police, do it nicely, from your heart, not from anger. This is a very touchy issue that has police feeling very defensive. So, don’t do it if you’re stopped by a cop. Do it when you see a cop in a place where you are not at risk of being mistreated or abused.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rob Kall is the founding editor of Opednews.com–– which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from a predominantly authoritarian matrix to a bottom-up one (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots).
Source: http://www.opednews.com/populum/printer_friendly.php?content=a&id=186225
PBA Blasts “Anti-Police Rhetoric” After Eric Garner Death
By: NY1 News Updated 8/5/2014 – 6:01 PM
Leaders of two police unions had some strong words Tuesday over what they are calling anti-police rhetoric in the wake of the death of Eric Garner last month.
APPENDIX I
Surprisingly, the mainstream media, including the NYC metro tabloids that pretend to care for the working class have been divided by Lynch’s deranged accusations. The New York Post, a filthy tabloid controlled by Rupert Murdoch, the master of Fox News, an unmatched massmind polluter, has not surprisingly sided with Lynch, but the equally influential Daily News actually came out speaking in critical tones of the PBA’s chief.
BELOW, SEE EXCERPTS FROM THE DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL AND OTHER MEDIA ON LYNCH’S RHETORIC, INCLUDING THE VOCALLY CRITICAL, AND SPOT ON, GAWKER.COM ANALYSIS.
[learn_more caption=”Cop leader Pat Lynch recklessly targets enemies, including Mayor de Blasio“]
Pat Lynch, who’s the enemy in your NYPD union’s war?
Police union chief Pat Lynch recklessly targets “enemies,” including Mayor de Blasio
Friday, December 19, 2014, 4:05 AM
“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.” READ THE REST
For its part, Newsweek, struck a more conciliatory tone, posting a more polished essay on Lynch, suggesting some explanations of why he sees the world through such a thuggish fascistic prism:
“The Urban Lazarus
It takes Patrick Lynch a very long time to get around New York: Merely walking to his SUV, parked around the corner from his office at the tip of lower Manhattan, can take 15 minutes. That’s because Lynch makes a point of shaking hands with every police officer within about a 20-foot range. A more distant officer will get a wave and a shouted greeting. The flesh-pressing is mostly just saluting the troops, but it is also good politics, since Lynch is up for reelection next year (his fifth term). With his graying hair perfectly slicked back and a pinstripe suit outlining solid features, Lynch has neatly transitioned from policing to politics.
The PBA’s communications director, Al O’Leary, believes Lynch is the most powerful police union chief in the world: His union has twice as many members as Chicago does police officers. Lynch’s loudest critics—for example, a city councilman who had once been a Black Panther and deemed the PBA the “Police Brutality Association” after the Stansbury shooting—would be dismayed to know how little impact they have on his ironclad convictions. He is not reflective, nor is he paid to be. His job is to be the strident, unflagging voice of his beat cops in contract talks and grievance hearings.
Lynch is also a stentorian frontman for a profession that has not been popular of late; perhaps his most pressing duty is to be a tireless reminder of law enforcement’s role in making urban life attractive once more. The return of American urbanism in the late 20th century was led by New York, which in 1990 had 2,245 murders: six a day and about seven times higher than its murder rate in 2013. Today, the metropolitan revival has spread so far beyond the five boroughs that there is unironic talk of resurgence in places like Kansas City and Omaha. But if Lazarus has risen in Milwaukee, it’s not entirely because the celebrated creative class brought him back to life in its graphic design studios and vegan cupcake shops. The cities had to be made safe before they were made hip. And that was done in part by police officers like Lynch.
But as crack dens become condominiums, memories fade. In recent years, police officers have frequently found themselves vilified both by poor minorities pushed by gentrification into ever-more-distant neighborhoods and by the upper-middle-class whites who have replaced them in “up-and-coming” areas.
Perhaps that’s because cops serve as an uncomfortable reminder of what it takes to make Brooklyn a playground for the Lena Dunhams of this world. Like teenagers, we chafe at them, doubly so because we badly need them. Not that those who enforce the law always abide by it. To an unabashed cop defender like Lynch, what he says are rare instances of police misbehavior have received an inordinate response that points to a deeper antipathy, a growing ingratitude. “Maybe we’re forgetting what it felt like to be afraid,” he says with something approaching bitterness.
‘A Bunch of Thugs… ’
Patrick Lynch, now 51, was reared in Bayside, Queens, the last of seven children in an Irish-Catholic family. He went to Monsignor Scanlon High School, in the Bronx. There, he met Kathleen Casey, who became his wife. They have two sons. One is a police cadet. The other is a police officer. Lynch still lives in Bayside, close to where he was raised.
Lynch’s father spent 30 years as a subway motorman, and Lynch worked briefly as a train conductor. He became a police officer on January 4, 1984, assigned to the 90th Precinct in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Today, that neighborhood is a global nexus of cool; 30 years ago, Lynch recalls, it was a “drug supermarket” with “crime out of control. There was no walking safely down the street [back then]. Now there’s clubs there, and that’s a direct result of police officers putting themselves at risk.”
Nevertheless, recent events have provided a vexing challenge to Lynch: New York has never been safer, and the police have never been less popular. Last spring, the NYPD’s social media team encouraged city residents to use the #MyNYPD hashtag to tweet selfies with police officers. Within hours, Twitter exploded with photographs, coded with the hashtag, of NYPD officers looking like brutal foot soldiers of the 1 percent, swinging fists and crushing windpipes. Many were outraged by the social-media subversion, with the Daily News suggesting, in an editorial titled #ourNYPD, that the image of the NYPD as “a bunch of thugs haphazardly wielding force is gross, sloppy and plain wrong.” Yet a point had been made, in the plain sight of millions.
Lynch thinks that maybe it got too “good on the streets,” and that people have forgotten that they need the police. He thinks they will soon remember. He says he has seen an uptick in graffiti while driving around Brooklyn and Queens, a sure sign that the bad old days are returning.
A Slap in the Face
Lynch straddles a tricky divide: A product of the old, heavily Irish department, he must work within the new one, where a patrol car might have an officer from Warsaw and another from Port-au-Prince. That task is complicated by the fact that Lynch regularly has to defend the use of force by white cops against blacks. His job is to defend all cops, regardless of their race, yet in his statements to the media after such a shooting, Lynch shows little sensitivity to black and brown victims of police force—even if he knows that an increasing number of his officers come from those communities. (From: Patrick Lynch, New York City’s Blue Bulldog, / OCTOBER 22, 2014)
Finally, for this roundup, we repost here some passages from a fraternal site, gawker.com. In a piece signed by J. K. Trotter, gawker.com stated,
“Patrick Lynch is the 51-year-old president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest and most influential union of the New York City Police Department. You might recognize his name: Over the weekend, Lynch blamed Bill de Blasio for the Saturday deaths of two Brooklyn cops who were murdered by a lone gunman from Georgia. “That blood on the hands,” he said at a press conference, “starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.”
To understand why he would say something so wrong and inflammatory, you need to delve into Lynch’s long, checkered history of issuing similarly insane statements. His public declarations over the past 15 years are essentially pro-police agitprop: Cops can do no wrong, while victims of their state-sanctioned violence always had it coming. They are also a deep well of masculine anxiety, hurt feelings, and barely disguised racism…”
Trotter proceeded to provide a list of Lynch’s big mouth “hits” over the years. He advised, “Please consult them whenever he opens his mouth in the future.”
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