Steve Osborne, a retired lieutenant with the New York City Police Department, turns in a depressing yet predictable op-ed for the New York Times. It is a measure of restraint, but only a measure, that Lt. Osborne does not go nearly as far as Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, who notoriously announced after the brutal murder of two police officers that “there’s blood on many hands tonight” and “that blood on the hands starts at City Hall in the office of the mayor.”
Osborne eschews the inflammatory rhetoric, but simply takes it for granted that the blame for the tension between the police department and Mayor William de Blasio lies entirely with the mayor. “Mr. de Blasio is more than any other public figure in this city responsible for feelings of demoralization among the police. It did not help to tell the world about instructing his son, Dante, who is biracial, to be wary of the police, or to publicly signal support of anti-police protesters (for instance, by standing alongside the Rev. Al Sharpton, a staunch backer of the protests).”
With those words, Lt. Osborne unconsciously states his true conviction: that the police are above criticism. The facts of the matter don’t matter. It doesn’t matter that a helpless black man was choked to death for the crime of selling loose cigarettes and the police officer who did it was not indicted. No one has the right to protest that. The police are always right. They never can be questioned.
Lt. Osborne’s justification for this claim, which he is not even aware that he is making, is that the police do a uniquely dangerous job, one that sets them apart from ordinary mortals. “During my 20 years on the job (I retired in 2003), I attended far too many funerals for cops killed in the line of duty.” New York has 34,000 uniformed officers. If you drew a circle in Anacostia, one of the poorest areas in Washington, DC, that contained 34,000 individuals, and you attended the funeral of every person who died there in a violent crime from 1983 to 2003, you would have attended more funerals than did Lt. Osborne. Nationwide, in 2013, out of 900,000 officers, only 100 died as a result of job-related injury. There are many more lines of work that are far more hazardous than police officer, and they don’t come with pensions after twenty years’ service. Logging, the most dangerous, has a fatality rate more than ten times higher than that for the police.
It is dangerous when anyone places himself above the law. But it is especially dangerous when the police do so. And, clearly, that is what they do in New York.
