Blas’ Gift to Lawbreakers: Handcuffing the Police
Mayor de Blasio has finally accomplished something (“Take off ‘cuffs’!” July 17). He has proven that the pen is certainly mightier than the sword.
By signing the ridiculous police-reform legislation, he has chopped the Police Department off at the knees.
In addition to destroying the morale of the department, de Blasio has made it impossible for people to live safely in front of their homes and walk in their neighborhoods.
He obviously knows that he can’t be reelected, thank God, so this is the only notoriety that he can possibly achieve. While he has no political future, he is threatening the future of every New Yorker. Ronald Alois
Brooklyn
De Blasio, stop pretending you care about this city. You slashed the NYPD budget, signed a law severely restricting how officers can use force, emptied out the jails and barely raised a complaint when Albany’s criminal-justice reform law went into effect.
And yet you keep saying the shootings in this city are unacceptable, and you’re going to get a handle on it.
You’ve done nothing but divide this city along race and class lines. You even campaigned on the platform that New York City is a “tale of two cities.” Congratulations, in six short years, your policies saw to it that things may remain that way long after you’re gone. Sebastian Mannuzza
Astoria
No surprise that de Blasio has no respect for outspoken police-union head Ed Mullins. He hardly has any respect for law-abiding citizens — or himself, for that matter.
While we are seeing photos and videos of police officers being bloodied and battered by outof-control mobs, de Blasio is boasting about the record release of prisoners from the jails and announcing that violent crimes are decreasing.
At the same time, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea is whining about de Blasio’s police reforms. What the commissioner needs to do is shed those puppet strings that de Blasio is holding over him. Nicholas Maffei
Yonkers
The de Blasio administration has consistently shown its disregard for the NYPD and its leadership. It has dismantled successful crime-fighting strategies that have been in place for years and saved thousands of lives.
The mayor has led the effort to allow criminals to walk out of jail within hours of arrest and has marginalized the leadership of the NYPD and ignored their advice.
Commissioner Shea and his team have spent their careers trying to make the city a better place for everyone, and now they must watch it be destroyed.
Do they want to be remembered as the ones who were on watch when the ship hit the iceberg? I think not. For the sake of the department they serve and the citizens of the city, I think that they should retire as a group, and do so publicly, as a protest against this radical and destructive administration.
Robert DeCandia
New Hyde Park
Early on, it was fairly obvious to anyone with common sense that the mayor was incompetent. It’s becoming very clear that he is dangerously so. People are dying because of his actions.
While murders and violence continue to escalate exponentially in this city to levels we have not seen in decades, the mayor has signed a bill to further restrict NYPD officers from doing their job to protect the citizens of New York.
He had the colossal audacity to visit the family of Davell Gardner after the 1-year-old was tragically murdered in a shooting, when it was the very policies this mayor initiated that led to this terrible tragedy. Joseph Paino
Manhattan
De Blasio signed the anti-chokehold bill, making an impossible job even harder.
How in the world do officers take down a man who is high, drunk, verbally abusing them or just doesn’t want to be arrested now? Answer: They can’t.
Good luck, New York. If you wanted to destroy a city, you couldn’t have done a better job than de Blasio. Leo Kibler
The Bronx