There's one person who can fix the growing divide between the New York Police Department and Mayor Bill de Blasio, union leaders said Wednesday: former President Bill Clinton.
Sources told
The New York Post that the proposal was made during a meeting between Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and the heads of the NYPD's five unions, and was proposed by Michael Palladino, who heads the department's detectives union.
"Palladino said the mayor needs someone like Bill Clinton to act as an intermediary," the source told The Post, and noted that the former president would be the ideal choice for a mediator because "he's a statesman; he's well-respected; he's a good mediator and he was a pro-law-enforcement president."
Clinton's camp did not comment on the report. However, last month, the former president spoke out after a grand jury declined to indicted the NYPD officer who killed Staten Island resident Eric Garner while he was being arrested for selling loose cigarettes on the street.
"He was doing something he should not have been doing," Clinton told the Fusion news channel in an interview done shortly after the grand jury's Dec. 3 decision, reported
The New York Daily News at the time. "That was illegal. He was selling untaxed cigarettes on the street in small volumes, trying to make a little extra money. But he didn’t deserve to die because of that."
Further, the former president said Americans have racial "preconceptions wired into us — and we have got to get beyond them," and that there is a "divide that exists between the community and the police."
De Blasio's relationship with the police went from troubled to worse following the grand jury's decision on Garner and the shooting death of Ferguson, Missouri, 18-year-old Michael Brown. Police were offended after the mayor commented that he had warned his own biracial son to be careful in his dealings with the police.
The mayor said this week that he would
not be apologizing for his statements, as doing so would be "about the past. And I just don't want to do that. I think this is about moving forward."
And after police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were killed, execution style, as they sat in a cruiser in Brooklyn, the head of one of the department's key unions accused the mayor of having "blood on his hands."
Thousands of police officers, in return, turned their backs on de Blasio as he delivered the slain officers' eulogies.
Meanwhile, two more
police officers were shot in the Bronx on Monday night and survived their wounds, reports The Post.
Officer Aliro Pellerano was released from a Bronx hospital on Wednesday, with police officers meeting him to cheer as he went home. Fellow Officer Andrew Dossi, who was shot along with Pellerano while they were investigating a robbery at a Bronx bodega, was nearly paralyzed by one of the bullets, which hit him in the back, and is expected to remain in the hospital at least another two weeks, The Post reports.
His left forearm was also shattered in the shooting.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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