Sharpton gets his dead cop

Israel went off of Daylight Saving Time yesterday (Sunday 2 AM).

Meanwhile, the rainy season is now upon us (there are only 2 seasons here, the rainy season and the dry season).  It was sunny this morning, when I went into Tel Aviv.  The rain started in the early afternoon during the bus ride home.

Back in the States, looks as though Al Sharpton has gotten what his people asked for.  Recall, last December, the marchers in New York City who were inspired by Sharpton's demagoguery were chanting "What do we want?  Dead Cops!  When do we want it?  Now!"

Seems that by the time you read this, Sharpton may already have  spoken at the funeral of fallen NYPD Officer Randolph Holder.  Queries (May already be answered by the time you read this):  Why is Officer Holder's family acquiescing in Sharpton's eulogism?  And will the NYPD rank and file, who, no doubt, will show up in force at the funeral, turn their backs on Sharpton as they did on Mayor de Blasio last December at the funerals of NYPD officers (posthumously promoted to Detectives)  Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos?  Just wondering.

The Rioting in Baltimore

As noted in the 14 April 2015 posting, we are in the process of selling our house and relocating to Israel for what is shaping up to be a protracted period.  This, of course, has consumed our time and energies in ways that go beyond what will be covered in this posting; our realtor now is trying to get everyone together in the same room for the sale closing, with her sights on the middle of next week. This will leave us legally homeless; not to worry, though, because my wife's sister and her husband have graciously offered to put us up in their home for the few weeks between the closing and our departure.   And the date of our departure is now subject to change; my wife's gig in Israel is trying to get her to start a few weeks earlier than planned.  We shall see how that one plays out.

One thing that has garnered the attention of me and my wife is the disconnect between, on one hand, what we read in the news media and hear on campus; and on the other hand, our own experiences in making the various and sundry relocation arrangements.  Last week we visited, among other things, three banks, one insurance agency, a dry cleaner, and, in the case of my wife, a nail manicurist and a wig stylist.  Not one of the personnel encountered in those visits was Jewish, yet, each and every one of them expressed more than a little bit of excitement and congratulations for our upcoming move.  On the other hand, while I did encounter similar enthusiasm from various contacts on the college campus where I teach, there were a few instances of getting "that look" from some far-leftward leaning academics; one even made a comment bordering on the derogatory.  Considering the sources of the comments and attitudes, pro and con, we know that we are doing the right thing.

So, in the strictest sense, the Baltimore riots are not a direct concern for me because I will be far from Baltimore very soon, and have no plans to visit Baltimore between now and our move.

Except that this presumes that the Baltimore rioting will stay in Baltimore.  I remember the Long Hot Summer of 1967, and the 1968 riots which used Dr. Martin Luther King's murder as a pretext for lawlessness.  I am not a gambling man, but if I were, you would need to offer me very, very long odds to make book on the Baltimore rioting not spreading elsewhere.  And if the riots come to New York City, there are some areas of Long Island that are naturals to follow suit. 

And I will be frequenting various and sundry locales in New York City and on Long Island on an almost daily basis, probably until I leave for Israel.

I am willing to bet that IF New York City remains reasonably tranquil, then Long Island would be spared any major rioting.  And that big IF depends, in no small measure, upon how Mayor Bill de Blasio plays his cards.  Blaz ran on a "progressive" (read "Far Left") platform that implicitly if not explicitly promised to hand out lots big pie slices to various disadvantaged minority groups.  Now that Blaz is ensconced in Gracie Mansion, he needs to act like an executive and run the city -- which means making do with limited resources, and saying "No" to more than a few supplicants.  He has already developed friction with many groups typically thought of as his constituency, and which did in fact support his bid for Mayor.

I note that he moved very quickly to smooth over the rift that developed with the Police Department.  This, I do believe, was motivated not so much from the bombast of Patrick Lynch, the police union head honcho, but by de Blasio's pragmatic knowledge that he needs the NYPD to keep order in the city.

But given Blaz's engagement of the likes of Al Sharpton as bedfellows, his relationship with NYPD can never be ideal.

Everyone seems to be watching Baltimore.  I'm watching New York City.

Back to the Mayor: A Postmortem

 The prior posting predicted, with no elevated degree of premonitory clairvoyance, a significant number of New York's Finest and other law enforcement personnel pivoted 180 degrees when Alleged Mayor de Blasio gave the eulogy for Detective Wenjian Liu at today's funeral.

I am of two minds on the subject.  On one hand, if substantially all of the NYPD rank-and-file had heeded Commissioner Bratton's precatory advice to not diss de Blasio during the funeral, then they would have placed a significant degree of bargaining power into the Commissioner's hands, and the Bratton might now have a little bit more of the upper hand in his dealings with City Hall.  By ignoring Bratton's entreaties, they have now placed Bratton into somewhat of a tight corner.  Though he does have a legal right to prohibit his troops from acting in such a disrespectful manner, his ability to make any such ukases stick is in serious doubt.  This is the point where the slope downward towards constabulary unruliness and anarchy starts to get slippery and steep.

On the other hand, the same standard can be applied to de Blasio and his team, including and especially Al Sharpton.  Sharpton, you will recall, ignored Blaz's entreaties to hold back on the disruptive protests.  Good chance that Sharpton may show at the tomorrow's rally called for in front of the courthouse by Eric Garner's daughter.  If so, and if Sharpton is up to his usual modus operandi, then Blaz will not occupy any moral high ground with respect to the NYPDers dorsal disrespect display.  Blaz and Sharpton were molded from the same piece of excrement, and are fused together.

My concern is for the safety of New York City.  While the NYPDers can certainly not be expected to pretend that they enjoy the lack of support they have gotten from Commissar Blaz, there is reason to fear that, in their zeal to right the situation, they -- and de Blasio -- may well make safe streets a secondary if not tertiary priority.

 

Updated Call for Cop Funeral:

Wishing my readers a Happy New Year.

Update to prior posting:

Last night, the annual Times Square Ball & Confetti Drop seems, from the news reports (I was not there), to have gone off without any undue violence, and Sharpton's Shitheads seem to have garnered comparatively little attention from the crowds and the Fourth Estate.  Maybe the cold temperatures and the dearth of latrine facilities had something to do with it.

So anything Commissar de Blasio may have done in the waning hours of 2014 to aggravate the tensions between his administration and the NYPD falls squarely upon his shoulders, and cannot be attributed to unruly protesters who weren't really part of "the Movement."

The phraseology "may have done" is deliberate hyperbolic understatement.  Blaz managed, unaided, to spit in the faces of all the NYPDers when he re-upped the The Dishonorable Laura Johnson for another stint on the Criminal Court bench.  Johnson, you will recall, released without bail some criminals who credibly threatened cops, including one who had failed to show for a court hearing and who had an outstanding arrest warrant.

The chances for another turning of backs towards the alleged Mayor at Sunday's funeral for Officer Wenjian Liu (as distinguished from a simple "cold, steely silence" have just increased quite markedly.  And Blaz cannot now whine that Sharpton made him do it.

This Time at Times Square

There are less than six hours to go (Eastern Standard Time) for the calendar year of 2014.  This Blog has previously weighed in on New Year's celebrations in general, and on the famed one at Times Square in particular.  This year, the Times Square event carries implications that were not there in prior years.

In prior years, everyone is there to celebrate the coming of the New Year, even if it constitutes little more than an excuse for drunken revelry.  This year, Al Sharpton's anti-cop, anti-America, anti-civilization crowd specifically plans to disrupt the Times Square ball drop festivities.

From the calm of my own desk in my own home/office, I now ponder the following imponderables:

**  Given the New York City Police's obviously concerted decrease in arrests and summonses (synonym:  labor strike), are the NYPDers really up to preserving order and decorum to the extent they have been in prior years?

**  Wishful thinking:  If Sharpton's Shitheads get too overly out of hand, might the NYPD enlist the good offices of the FDNY to borrow their fire hoses to douse the protesters, what with the colder-than-usual temperatures this year at Times Square?

**  How will the majority of revelers, who will be at Times Square with the intention of having a good time for New Years, interact with Sharpton's Shitheads?  Will they join the protesters?  Will they turn upon the protesters?  If so, to what extent will the NYPD intervene?

**  Might there be potential for an incident or event at tonight's festivities to impact the attitudes (and therefore, actions) of the NYPDers with respect to their decorum when Commissar de Blasio speaks at the upcoming funeral of Officer Wenjian Liu?

"They're Your People! Back Them Up!!"

The funeral of Officer Rafael Ramos of the NYPD was today.  Being that Saturday is my religious Sabbath, my personal attendance was out of the question, as was my monitoring of the funeral via today's modern electronic technologies.  There had been some discussions and speculations as to how the rank-and-file NYPDers would present themselves vis-a-vis New York City's alleged Mayor, Bill de Blasio.  A week before, they had already turned their backs their backs to the alleged Mayor as he came to the hospital where Officers Ramos and Liu were taken following their brutal murder.

I gave the odds as 60:40 that the NYPD rank and file would once again turn away from Blaz, leaving open the possibility that PBA President Pat Lynch may have decided on a strategy to take the high road, leaving Blaz to worry about when the other shoe would drop.  But just before I shut down my computer for the Sabbath, I came across the news item that some persons unknown, presumably current or former NYPDers, had chartered a plane to fly over the Hudson River, dragging the banner message "De Blasio, Our Backs Have Turned To You."

I knew then and there that there was no 60:40 or 50:50, but that there was a 100% probability that there would be thousands of NYPDers and other law enforcement officers at Officer Ramos's funeral, and that they would be turning their backs to de Blasio.  And so it came to pass.

Two years out of college, I was working as an Administrator for a certain electronics firm that was a subsidiary of, and housed in the same building as, the parent company, a larger electronics firm.  Our division President, who was my boss's boss, was a vice-president of the parent company.

I was once at a meeting where the topic of discussion was a certain project in Oklahoma and in Ohio that required the interface of our division with another division of the parent company, offices located upstairs and down the hall from our own.  My division President was at the meeting, and I was covering the meeting for my own boss, who was out of town at the time.  Our Division President confronted the Other Division President (also a VP of the parent company) with a document produced by two of the ODP's underlings, with whom I had been interfacing.  The document was clearly based upon invalid data, and had faulty rationale.

The ODP said to my DP, "Oh, that's just the work of "Laurel" and "Hardy," but we don't have to go with their numbers or schedules.  They're shitheads anyway!"

So my DP said to the ODP, "George, they may be shitheads, but they work for you!   They're your people, so you have to back them up or flush them out!

"And by the way, George," my DP continued, "I don't have any shitheads working for me.  But even if I did, I certainly wouldn't tell anybody about it!"

[I, of course, ended up having to refigure the numbers and the schedule, but once I did that, there was no pushback from "Laurel" and "Hardy," nor, I was informed, from George.  In the next two months I traveled to Oklahoma and to Ohio to get the project going.].

The one (and perhaps the only) common denominator of all the effective supervisors to whom I have ever reported is that they either stood up for their own people, or, if they could not stand up for them, they got rid of them.  All "visits to the woodshed" were done privately.

And the few supervisors I have had who were ineffectual (including my aforementioned boss who was out of town that day) all, without exception, failed to give their own people the proper backing, and failed to keep their admonitory chastisements behind closed doors.

And when I held a supervisory position with Uncle Sam, I backed up my people as best as I could (for a while I was severely hampered by another ineffectual boss who failed to give me the backing I needed, and who allowed his soul sister to bypass me with her issues and go directly to him, but his subsequent criminal indictment gave me much vindication a few years later).

With that background, I direct your attention, dear reader, to the New York City Charter:

Chapter 1, Section 8(a):

"The mayor shall be responsible for the effectiveness and integrity of city government operations and shall establish and maintain such policies and procedures as are necessary and appropriate to accomplish this responsibility including the implementation of effective systems of internal control by each agency and unit under the jurisdiction of the mayor."

Chapter 18 of the City Charter places the New York City Police Department under the jurisdiction of the Mayor, and spells out the duties and mission of the NYPD.

Bill de Blasio's problem:  He. Doesn't. Back. His. Own. People.  And in return, they are showing him their own backs.

Look for the situation to further deteriorate.  Blaz is too firmly welded to Sharpton to be able to shake him off. I only hope that the NYPD rank and file appreciate the New Yorkers and visitors to the city who empathize with them.