New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has a chance to
mend fences with his city's police officers, starting on Tuesday afternoon at a closed-door meeting with their union leaders, but one sit-down won't be enough to quell the bad blood between them, a retired NYPD detective tells
Newsmax TV.
"The mayor was fostering an anti-NYPD atmosphere in the city from the time he ran his [mayoral] campaign to presently where he is today," Wally Zeins, who oversaw the Manhattan detectives squad on 9/11, told "MidPoint" guest host Ric Blackwell on Tuesday.
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Zeins predicted that "the mayor will apologize" to a group including Patrick Lynch, the union official who said de Blasio had
blood on his hands after the murders of two patrolmen.
He said that Police Commissioner William Bratton, a de Blasio appointee, will also be at the table to serve as a kind of "hostage negotiator" who works to keep emotions in check.
"You've got to get both sides, from rational to irrational, on an equal balanced plane," said Zeins. "Everybody has to participate, and if they can sit down and work out some of the things that are going on right now, things will change."
Zeins said that the rancor started well before the Dec. 20 execution-style killings of officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, who were targeted by a man, Ismaail Brinsley, vowing revenge for unarmed black men killed in encounters with police.
"Remember, the mayor came into this administration with [his opposition to] stop-and-frisk first," said Zeins. "That was his big thing, his big campaign: He was going to reinvent the NYPD. Then, we got into a situation when we had all these protesters come on."
De Blasio's tacit support for protesters demanding changes in policing, combined with his remarks on fearing for the safety of his bi-racial son at the hands of police, have created "big problems" and widened a gap that exists between cops and civilians even in the best of times, said Zeins.
"There are two civilizations in our country, and you have to learn how to speak fluent cop," he said, adding, "When the mayor, who is the civilian, can talk to the police in their language, and the police in his language, we will have some sort of opportunity to have some better understanding and work better together. We have to."
Zeins also suggested that it's time for de Blasio to put distance between himself and Al Sharpton, the New York-based civil rights leader who has placed himself at the center of this year's furor over policing and race relations.
Zeins called Sharpton a "dirtbag" and somebody who "stirs the pot," and said that when de Blasio speaks with Sharpton at his side, "that is such a slap to the face of everybody."
Zeins also said a growing number of attacks on police officers in other cities is no coincidence.
"The word is getting out across the country, and there are people that do not like the police and figure that [if] they assassinate two cops in New York, well we can do it anywhere we want," he said.