PBA’S CHEAP SHOT WAS A CONTRACT HIT

“DON'T LET THEM insult your sacrifice!”

So says the Patrol men's Benevolent Association, which posted a document on its website for officers to sign if they do not want Mayor de Blasio or City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito to attend their funerals should they be killed in the line of duty.

This marks a new low in PBA attacks on the mayor. It will only further strain relations between the city’s largest police union and themayor–a divide exposed in the wake of the grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner.

In the eyes of the PBA, de Blasio has become irredeemably anti-cop. The online pledge and PBA President Pat Lynch’s recent claim that de Blasio has thrown cops “under the bus” are part of the PBA’s fierce campaign to defend NYPD officers using whatever rhetorical weapons available.

De Blasio didn’t help matters by racializing Garner's death. Following the grand jury's verdict, the mayor said that: “It was not years of racism that brought us to thisday... but centuries of racism.”

It sounded like the mayor was demagogically suggesting that New York police officers prey on minorities.

The war of words has been further inflamed by the fact that the mayor and the PBA have been locked in tense contract talks that are now at an impasse and are headed to binding arbitration. Ever since de Blasio’s deal with the teachers’ union, the PBA has complained that cops were getting the short end of the salary stick.

So this latest rhetorical assault should be seen as part of a crusade to call into question the mayor’s support for the police–whether in press conferences or in closed-door bargaining seasons. The PBA’s hope is to establish a pattern of mayoral opposition that will influence an arbitrator to side with police officers’ demands for bigger raises.

However, this self-interested campaign is undercutting civil discourse in a challenging moment for the city and the nation.

Daniel Di Salvo is an assistant professor of political sciencein

the Colin Powell School at the City College of New York-CUNY and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.