Bratton: All hues true blue

Calls racism claim ‘poison’

A DAY AFTER trashing the Black Lives Matter movement as leaderless yelling and screaming, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton defended cops against stereotypes that paint them as racist killers.

“There are 36,000 cops here in New York City,” Bratton said at a news conference at 1 Police Plaza. “There are 850,000 of us across the country. They come in all races and colors, especially in New York.

“To call (all police officers) racists, all of them, or killers, all of them, is to commit the same sin they are protesting. You can’t say that people are bad because they are blue.”

With a nation still in mourning over the deadly attack last week on Dallas cops, and communities in pain over lethal police brutality, the commissioner decried rhetoric threatening cops in recent years.

“This kind of poison talk — calling police, as a profession, murderers, racists — are the kind of generalizations that fuel hate, not solutions,” Bratton said, as his boss, Mayor de Blasio sat beside him.

“We saw that in New York in 2014, with the murder of my two detectives. And we saw it last week with the murder of five police officers in Dallas. That contributed to the murders of those detectives and those officers.”

De Blasio, at the news conference, acknowledged a difference of opinion on the Black Lives Matter movement, but said they were in “strategic unity.”

But Bratton, a cop for 45 years who has also run police departments in Boston and Los Angeles, said he didn’t want to see all cops painted with the same brush any more than he wanted to see black people stereotyped.

At the same time, Bratton also touted the department’s diversity — highlighting the percentage of black, Hispanic, Asian and Muslim officers.

To call all of them racists or killers is to commit the same sin they are protesting. COMMISSIONER BRATTON