This week both the New
York Times and Nation magazine
covered the continued ill will that the New York police department has been
directing at New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio since His Honor joined most New
Yorkers in questioning police tactics and procedures after the deaths of Akai Gurley and Eric Garner.
The Times article details the missteps that it
believes de Blasio has made in his interactions with the police department and
police unions. For example, the Times
claims that the rank-and-file felt that de Blasio displayed disrespect towards
them by embracing the Reverend Al Sharpton, a critic of the police. Then they
got pissed when de Blasio hired Sharpton’s former spokesperson as an aide; the
cops supposedly didn’t like that her significant other (whom the Times chooses to label as a “live-in
boyfriend”) was convicted of murder.
By contrast, Nation takes the long view, recounting
the bad blood that the New York police had with past New York mayors going all
the way back to Fiorello La Guardia, and including Robert Wagner, John Lindsay,
David Dinkins and rightwing idol Rudy Guiliani. The Nation also demonstrates with solid numbers that none of these
mayors suffered any vote loss in elections after having public spats with the
NYPD rank and file. Nation examines
the broader issue of the relationship between the police and the rest of
government as a minor dynamic in New York City history
In the Times article, de Blasio comes across as
stunned and dismayed by the rift. Nation
decides not to characterize the mayor’s current state of mind, instead
reminding both the mayor and all of us that New Yorkers appreciate and re-elect
strong New York mayors who stick to their principles.
The Times reduces the story to personalities
to inflate its significance. Nation
places it into the broader context of history to demonstrate its inherent
triviality. Both approaches to journalism and history go back a long way.
Thucydides used the great man idea—this notion that the actions of a few
individuals determines history—when depicting the Peloponnesian War
in ancient times, and Victorian Thomas Carlyle proposed it as the explanation
of all of history. Karl Marx and the Annales school of historians led by Lucien
Febvre, Fernand Braudel and others took a broader look at long-lasting trends
and the movement, beliefs and actions of groups more than individuals.
Maybe it’s my
leftwing bias, but I’m inclined to side with the Nation on this issue, both in its conclusions and the way it
covered the story.
Unfortunately, the Times circulation is more than 1.8
million, approximately 14 times the 125,500 readership of Nation, plus Times
articles are routinely published ubiquitously in hard copy and over the
Internet, whereas mainstream media aggregators and reprinters assiduously avoid
Nation’s articles. Thus many more
people will read the Times
sensationalized version of the relationship between the mayor and the police
than the Nation’s studied analysis.
In a coda to this
tale of dueling points of views—the personal versus the historical—Mayor de
Blasio has subsequently said that he would veto a City Council law
criminalizing the police use of chokeholds. It doesn’t mean that de Blasio is
now capitulating to the police to curry their favor. De Blasio’s point is that
chokeholds are already against NYPD regulations, so a law is not needed.
Instead of seeking to wreak vengeance on a police department that has shown him
uncalled-for disrespect, de Blasio is behaving like an adult and expecting the
police department to behave in the same way. New York City doesn’t need a law
if the department enforces regulations.
The key, of course,
is to enforce the regulation and go after any offenders.
No comments:
Post a Comment