De Blasio can’t win

No one quite remembers how Jumaane Williams became acting mayor of New York City, having replaced Bill de Blasio, who departed office just as the city was coming out of the worst of the coronavirus pandemic and right before the NYPD finally subdued groups of looters smashing storefronts under the cover of demonstrations against police brutality.

In the chaos of the short Williams mayoralty, some thought that Gov. Cuomo had recklessly used his authority to remove de Blasio for not accepting National Guardsmen; others recalled that de Blasio knuckled under to kooky calls for his head from both the left (Black Lives Matter, assorted popular liberals on Twitter) and right (Rudy Giuliani and others) for, take your incoherent pick, either backing the cops too much or not enough.

Oh, that’s right. It was just a fever dream during these unnerving times.

There’s a hell of a lot we dislike about de Blasio. We said so when we withheld a reelection endorsement. For days, he and the NYPD have not effectively quelled mayhem on the streets. The same can be said of many American mayors.

But de Blasio, who has appointed talented police commissioners, driven down crime and reformed policing even as radical critics have demanded emptying jails and ending all quality-of-life policing, walks a fine line: backing the right to protest while standing by overwhelmingly good cops, and calling for investigations of alleged abuses of police power when he sees them.

To the left he’s an NYPD apologist; to the right, David Dinkins redux. They’re both wrong.