De Blasio

with the job. In the 1960s, Mayor John Lindsay presided over riots in Harlem and an NYPD sickout and tried to impose civilian oversight on the police, while the PBA head at the time, Edward J. Kiernan, told reporters, “It’s open season on cops in this city. I refuse to stand by and permit my men to be gunned down while the Lindsay administration does nothing to protect them.” When Mayor Abe Beame was forced to lay off police officers as part of the effort to stave off municipal bankruptcy, police unions fought back by distributing leaflets titled Welcome to Fear City to tourists and warning them not to go out after dark or ride the subway. After Beame, mayors Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Bloomberg decided it was better to play nice with the unions than to risk war, and even as they held the line on generous raises, they rhetorically stood shoulder to shoulder with the men and women in uniform.

But none of de Blasio’s predecessors dealt with anything like 2020, which has brought one crisis after another—a plague out of the Middle Ages, an economic collapse reminiscent of the Great Depression, a city on the precipice of a long-term fiscal crisis like it’s the 1970s, and now protests over policing like something out of the 1960s.

These are strange days at City Hall. The place has been almost empty thanks to the coronavirus, with many of the mayor’s staffers working from home. The Room 9 press corps and the City Council are deserted. Friends and aides say the mayor is exhausted.

The core group of staffers who were with him as he rose through the City Council to public advocate and who powered his mayoral campaign have largely abandoned him, and many of them have taken to sniping at their former boss on Twitter. The mayor is seldom out among everyday New Yorkers. He kept up his routine at the Park Slope Y in the face of widespread mockery all these years because he said it connected him to his previous, pre-mayoral self, but while there, he rarely talked with his fellow gymgoers. Eagle-eyed Brooklynites have snapped pictures of the mayor walking in Prospect Park, catching him and McCray huddled against each other and glowering at anyone who bothers to interrupt their tête-à-tête.

Part of the problem, longtime friends and aides say, is that de Blasio is one of the few people in New York not really on social media. Until a few years ago, he still used a flip phone. The images that bounce around the internet don’t always reach the mayor, especially now that he’s not surrounded by his usual coterie of aides. Even as some of his own staffers, there to observe the demonstrations, were kettled in with protesters and unable to escape, de Blasio defended the NYPD and the strategy.

“He doesn’t see the footage you and I are seeing on Twitter. He doesn’t see the cops pepper-spraying protesters in the face or running over people,” says one former adviser. “He is counting on the PD or some staffer to tell him what is going on, and he doesn’t get that the world is watching this play out on their phones as it is happening.”

And part of it is that he just doesn’t seem to care. After winning reelection in 2017 despite a daily swirl of negative stories on alleged corruption around his administration, de Blasio grew convinced, aides say, that whatever the media and the elite are obsessed with doesn’t matter much to most New Yorkers. “He doesn’t think he gets credit for the reforms that he pushed through,” says a former adviser. “That is hard for him to accept, and it makes him really angry.”

He dismisses his former advisers who criticize him as people who “live in the world of public relations. I don’t live in that world.” That attitude, though, has long since curdled into an almost sneering contempt for a broad swath of New Yorkers who he thinks hold him in equal disdain.

“I think the big mistake on his part was that he never sought to go north of 59th Street, figuratively speaking at least,” says Bratton. “This is a city that celebrates its culture so much—that’s what brings outsiders here—and ignoring that is his fatal mistake. They accuse Trump of just reaching out to the 40 percent that makes up his base and nobody else, and the mayor makes the same mistake. He has a lot of credibility with the minority community, but he doesn’t engage much or seek the support of the power brokers of the city, and I think that is a mistake.”

Advisers say that being a parent has made this moment harder. His kids were highlighted often in his early political campaigns, and his son worked on his ill-fated presidential run, but they have mostly been absent recently. His 25-year-old daughter, Chiara, who had been quarantining at Gracie Mansion, got arrested during the protests, then had her name tweeted out by one of the police unions. De Blasio seethed privately and to the press, accusing the police of willfully violating her privacy. It showed that the unions saw nothing as off limits when it came to the mayor or his family.

On Friday, May 29, four days after George Floyd’s death, de Blasio was supposed to hold a regularly scheduled meeting with his top security officials to go over the plan for the summer. This year would be different, of course, because kids wouldn’t be in school buildings and New Yorkers would just be emerging from lockdown. The night before, they had heard about a few protests over the Floyd video, which was just starting to make the rounds, but they knew who was leading them. During the Friday meeting, reworked to be about the protests, the mayor’s office sent staff over to observe a nearby rally; they reported that it was peaceful. That night, the animated, sometimes chaotic protests spread to every corner of the city, with police striking back.

On May 31, the mayor went to Bedford-Stuyvesant. His team posted photos on social media of de Blasio meeting with elected officials and locals. When asked why the mayor had come, one of those elected officials, City Councilmember Robert Cornegy, told me, “Because I insisted.”

Cornegy added, “I wanted him to come out because I wanted him to hear from a community perspective of how the police were behaving. We have been peaceful out here, but when the police are heavyhanded, it ends up inciting people more than anything else.” (A spokesperson for the mayor disputes this characterization and says de Blasio called Cornegy “because his district had been the site of some more tense encounters.”)

Cornegy thought the mayor got it, but he was shocked a few hours later when de Blasio announced the first curfew in the city since 1945. “It seems like they are just trying to poke the bear,” Cornegy said, and indeed anyone following along on social media saw peaceful protesters face a police department given license to run roughshod over them.

On Monday, June 1, President Trump, in a conference call with the nation’s governors, told them they needed to “dominate” the unrest in their cities. Governor Cuomo had already sent state troopers to Buffalo, Syracuse, and Rochester and put the National Guard on standby. He called de Blasio and said he was very concerned that what was happening in the city wasn’t enough, that he had to double the police presence to maintain order. Cuomo said, according to one de Blasio aide, “Trump is going to send the Army to New York City.” He said the National Guard was available if

the city needed it. (A spokesperson for Cuomo says the governor did not invoke Trump on the call.)

The mayor and Police Commissioner Dermot Shea decided they needed to do something to keep Trump and the governor at bay, so they agreed with Cuomo to institute an 11 p.m. curfew and to double the on-the-ground police force. As de Blasio’s and Cuomo’s teams were working on a joint statement, the governor went on an upstate radio station and announced the curfew for New York City, blowing up the communications plan, according to de Blasio’s office. (“We worked with the city on every part of this announcement,” says a Cuomo spokesperson.) As aides scrambled, they watched on CNN as Trump gave a press conference and then the U.S. Park Police cleared out Lafayette Square Park in D.C. with tear gas.

Back in New York, there were tens of thousands of peaceful marchers but also looting down Fifth Avenue; a policeman was run over by a car in a hit-and-run. So City Hall clamped down further, moving the curfew to eight. The mayor went up to Fordham Road in the Bronx, where some of the worst looting had occurred. Aides say he couldn’t believe what he saw: Here were mom-and-pop businesses that had been in the community for generations, gutted. He heard of children from the neighborhood helping to clear the wreckage—not part of any organization, just there to help.

These were the mayor’s people, as he saw it: the city’s Black working class and smalltime entrepreneurs, who’d had their livelihoods devastated first by a pandemic and then by a riot.

If the mayor’s responses during this time were all over the place, it is because the mayor was too. He thought he was a movement guy, part of civil-rights and policereform crusades. He also believed that the protesters had been mixed in with a bunch of outside agitators determined to cause damage, as well as the stories of smallbusiness owners left to sweep up the glass. A mayor from another era might have figured New Yorkers would be aghast to see police vehicles ablaze, as 13 of them were, by the NYPD’s count, on the first few nights of the protests. But in 2020, a mayor might have figured that, in fact, New Yorkers were aghast to see peaceful marchers being kettled on the side of the road by NYPD officers in riot gear and pepper-sprayed in their faces as the public advocate turned mayor implemented a curfew and effectively shuttered Manhattan to outsiders.

Yet some in the de Blasio administration still see New York City as a success story. The Army stayed away, and so did the National Guard. There was no tear gas, no use of paramilitary police weapons, no deaths on either side, and limited injuries. Other mayors gave beautiful speeches or took a knee with protesters, but their cities burned.

“Did the mayor have some missteps? Yes,” says one aide. “And people that hate him are going to be fixated on it. But all this stuff about the PBA or about the Dinkins administration is bullshit. He wanted to keep New Yorkers safe. Let people take their shots at him if it makes them feel better. It has been like that the entire time he has been here. But this city is going to come out of this okay, and you can’t say that about a lot of cities.”

Although those protesters on the bridge—the ones whose paychecks the mayor signs and who, even if they left their jobs, might seek him out as a reference—were ostensibly there to protest the NYPD, they were also very much there to protest the way the mayor runs his office. Many described a workplace hostile to dissident voices, especially ones coming from Black and Latino staffers.

“Discrimination in his administration had been the dominant mode since the fucking thing started,” says Cristina Gonzalez, who worked in the Mayor’s Office of Appointments until 2017. “It’s in hiring, it’s how people are paid, it’s in microaggressions, it’s everything.” (According to a de Blasio spokesperson, 53 percent of top administration officials are white, down from 79 percent under Bloomberg.)

Many described a workplace where white people were promoted faster and their ideas listened to more. According to Gonzalez, a higher-up in the administration told his staff that straightened hair on women was more professional than natural hair.

“We have bitten our lips one too many times,” said Catherine Almonte, shouting into a bullhorn that had a stand with black women sticker affixed to its side.

What the public sees in the mayor’s policing is what these protesters say happens behind the scenes. Why in six years has de Blasio had three Irish-American police chiefs, passing over Black deputies? Why the harsh curfew and crackdown if he could see the reality of Black lives?

“I feel like I am working in the Giuliani administration,” says one longtime staffer. “He doesn’t listen to a lot of people. There are a lot of different types of mayors: Bloomberg let his agency heads decide everything; this one has decided that he knows best, he knows more than everybody else, and we are going to do what he says.”

Even de Blasio’s supporters and friends say this quality was evident when the coronavirus first struck, when the mayor was slow to move and ignored the advice of his own Health Department until mass resignations were threatened. Or you could trace it back earlier, to when, against the advice of all counsel, the mayor decided to run for president, a disastrous display that saw him stall at one percent in the polls.

“The problem he has,” says a former adviser, “is that nobody trusts his judgment anymore—not in City Hall, not in the city. And I don’t know how you get that trust back.” In his remaining time in office, the mayor seems determined to get in front of the tumult. He met with civilrights activists at Gracie Mansion and, at their suggestion, agreed to have a Black Lives Matter mural painted on one street of every borough. He held a conference call with staff in which he told them that he’d heard their concerns, that he was determined to do better, and that their cause was his.

“I have never heard him so contrite,” says one person who was on the call. Much of the mayor’s political focus appears to be on getting McCray elected as Brooklyn borough president next year. She is in charge of the coronavirus racial-equity task force and has been appearing at his side as the administration has attempted to quell the unrest. De Blasio is a political junkie, and keeping one hand in elective office is oxygen. But the calculus of that race has changed dramatically as his reputation sinks.

His response may be to at last go on the offensive with the police unions. When they released his daughter’s arrest information, he called it “unconscionable.” When police unions falsely accused Shake Shack employees of poisoning NYPD officers’ milkshakes, he blasted the union leadership, which “has engaged in racist activities so many times, I can’t even count. I’ve been fighting with these unions from day one,” he said. “These police-union leaders, not all of them, but too many of them, stand in the way of progress.”

His circle of advisers has shrunk to McCray and a few others, such as Ragone and longtime chief of staff Emma Wolfe. The phone calls with allies have begun to taper off. The City Council looks set to drive the agenda on police reform, calling for $1 billion in cuts to the NYPD budget, which will be hard for the mayor to turn down. The election to replace de Blasio is about to begin in earnest, and it appears to be a contest of who can criticize the mayor the most. He faces a growing rebellion at City Hall, upheaval in the streets, a pandemic, and police unions that are more irate than ever. He has lost the confidence of his own staff, his own law enforcement, and by all accounts his own city, and he still has 18 months to go. ■