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 With the city a focal point in a national debate over the killings
of unarmed black men by white police, the mayor has been struggling
to mend the most toxic rift in decades between City Hall and the
country's biggest police force.
Some booed as the mayor began his speech before 884 graduating
cadets at Manhattan's Madison Square Garden arena. He warmly praised
the police department.
"You will confront all the problems that plague our society," de
Blasio told the new officers. "Problems that you didn't create."
A heckler cried out, "You created them!"
Some in the audience applauded and cheered the outburst. De Blasio,
briefly flustered, continued his speech.
A dozen or so audience members turned their backs on the mayor,
repeating a gesture by thousands of officers from around the country
at Saturday's funeral for Police Officer Rafael Ramos. Police first
turned their backs on the mayor a week earlier when he arrived at
the hospital where Ramos and his partner, Wenjian Liu, were taken.
After the ceremony, some of the new officers said they appreciated
de Blasio's support.
Before the mayor had even finished speaking, his press office sent
journalists an email, apparently prepared in advance. It said this
was not the first time a New York mayor was booed at a police
graduation, and cited old news reports about de Blasio's three
predecessors getting similar treatment.
Asked whether police had turned their backs on other mayors, Marti
Adams, a spokeswoman for de Blasio, said she would have to
double-check.
The rift between de Blasio and many in the police department
preceded his taking office in January. De Blasio made police reform
a theme of his campaign.
The rift deepened when de Blasio expressed qualified support for
protests sparked by the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of
white police officers.
Some officers began openly shunning de Blasio after Ramos and Liu
were ambushed and shot dead as they sat in their squad car in
Brooklyn. The shooter wrote online that he was avenging the deaths
of two unarmed black men who died in confrontations with white
officers last summer in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York.
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De Blasio and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton are due to meet the
leaders of the city's five police unions on Tuesday, according to
the mayor's public schedule. In Los Angeles on Monday, police
detained one man and were searching for a second after what they
said was an unsuccessful sniper attack on two police officers in
their patrol car on Sunday night. No one was injured, and it was not
clear whether the incident was connected to the police protests.
Officer Liu's wake was scheduled for Saturday in Brooklyn and his
funeral for Sunday.
The slaying of Ramos and Liu has become a rallying point for police
forces beleaguered by months of demonstrations against police
tactics in New York and other cities.
The demonstrations began in August after a white police officer
fatally shot an unarmed black man, Michel Brown, 18, in Ferguson,
Missouri. The shooting and a grand jury's decision not to indict the
officer, Darren Wilson, triggered months of often-violent protests
in the St. Louis suburb. On July 17, Eric Garner, a 43-year-old
black man, died after New York police put him in a banned chokehold
while arresting him for illegally selling cigarettes. The grand jury
in that case decided not to indict the officer who applied the
chokehold, Daniel Pantaleo.
(Additional reporting by Barbara Goldberg and Steve Gorman; Editing
by Eric Beech and Jonathan Oatis)
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