NYPD union boss Ed Mullins blasts Mayor Bill de Blasio after Times Square shooting: 'City is in a freefall'
His tenure is nearing completion next month but New York Mayor Bill de Blasio will have a less-than-a-happy farewell. The Big Apple has seen a steady downfall in the recent months with its law and order situation deteriorating fast. Last Saturday, May 8, a shooting took place in the city’s Time Square in which three persons, including a four-year-old girl, were injured. Subsequently, the de Blasio administration has come under heavy criticism from the local police department, especially in the context of the call for defunding the police in the wake of the race riots that engulfed America following the brutal death of George Floyd in police custody.
Edward Mullins, president of New York Police Department (NYPD) union, has written exclusively for the Daily Mail in which he said the shooting in Times Square speaks abundantly “about life in the Big Apple under the stewardship of Mayor Bill de Blasio and the legions of feckless elected officials and enablers dangerously masquerading as leaders”. Mullins, who has been a member of the NYPD since 1982 and president of the NY Sergeants Benevolent Association since 2002, slammed not only the current mayor but also the Democratic Party’s mayoral aspirant Andrew Yang saying while the latter had said nothing in defense of the police while the call for defunding the law enforcement grew stronger, he said NY could not afford to defund the police after the recent shooting.
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Yang had said nothing in cops' favor earlier, says Mullins
“New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang, who prior to this incident had said nothing in defense of law enforcement amid the incessant 'defund the police' clamor, quickly weighed in at a hastily arranged press conference,” Mullins wrote, adding: “‘The truth is New York City cannot afford to defund the police,’ he said while also mentioning that he lived nearby.” The mayoral election will witness Democratic and Republican primaries next month while a general election will happen in November.
Speaking in favor of the police, Mullins wrote in his piece that police officer Alyssa Vogel rushed to the spot after hearing about the gunshots fired at West 45th Street and Broadway without thinking about her own safety. “That’s what cops do on a daily basis,” he wrote and added that Vogel saw her fellow officers treating two bystanders injured in the shooting. He said none came forward to help one of the injured women despite her screaming for help and mocked that “amid today’s ‘defund and denounce the police' culture, scores of bystanders took videos of the bloodshed”. He said Vogel also attended the child who was also shot in the leg and did her best to save the toddler.
Last month, a 44-year-old man from Kansas was hit by a bullet in the shoulder while walking in Times Square and Mullins said Mayor de Blasio “thought it was prudent to weigh in on the matter” since the spot where these offenses have taken place are known to be the “Crossroads of the World” and easily capture global attention. Mullins then blasted the Democratic mayor saying the latter feigned indignation on Saturday’s incident. “He called it ‘horrible and unacceptable’ before adding with a flourish, ‘this kind of thing should not happen in our city. There’s a lot of ways we can address it’,” he penned before taking on Yang.
Most victims are Black or Hispanic, says Mullins
Mullins then divulged the grim statistics of NY’s law and order situation saying more than 460 people have been shot in the Big Apple as of May 2, compared with 259 in 2020 and 239 in 2019. Bringing in the racial context, he said: “The fact that over 90 per cent of those victims were Black or Hispanic, and most of the shootings occurred north of 96th Street in Manhattan, or in distressed neighborhoods throughout the city's outer boroughs, makes the implicit bias of these purported leaders glaringly apparent”. He said people like Yang have shown no outrage yet.
“Nor was there any outrage from anyone in the political establishment when a one-year-old boy was shot and killed while sitting in a stroller at a July 4 barbecue last summer. There was also eerie silence when a six-year-old witnessed her father being gunned down while she was holding his hand as they crossed a Bronx street. Both were African American,” Mullins said.
The SBA president also slammed NY’s political leaders while saying that “there are scores of unindicted co-conspirators who should also face justice for their role in the city's descent into lawlessness”.
He then took on Governor Andrew Cuomo saying the latter “never met a murderer he did not want to parole”. He said de Blasio never let go an opportunity to slam the law-keepers and people like City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, als a Democrat, who he said was among the architects of bail and police ‘reform’ laws “which have rendered the cops all but impotent and turned New York into an urban facsimile of a Wild West frontier town”.
Mullins also did not spare NYC Police Commissioner Dermot Shea who he called Blasio enabler and considered him as “career police officers who shed their integrity and morality by signing on to the mayor’s runaway agenda that is characterized by unfathomable ineptitude and downright lunacy”.
“Words have consequences and, since first taking office in 2014, de Blasio's incendiary anti-police rhetoric has already resulted in three police officers being executed while sitting in police vehicles, Molotov cocktails being lobbed at officers and into police vehicles, armed assaults on police facilities, cops being pelted with debris, and wholesale damage to police and public property,” Mullins added.
"Let's be real. The city is in a freefall and there is no one in charge. The politicians who enacted the imbecilic reform laws are too proud or embarrassed to admit that they made a mistake," Mullins said, adding that no other police department in the world has been held as accountable as the NYPD.
Early in his career, Mullins, 59, was assigned to the 13th Precinct on Manhattan’s East Side and almost a decade later, was promoted to the post of a detective and assigned to the 10th Precinct in Manhattan’s Chelsea area. In 1993, he was promoted to Sergeant and assigned to the 19th Precinct on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and later the Detective Bureau in Brooklyn South where he worked in the 67th Precinct Detective Squad, Special Victims Squad, and the Kings County District Attorney's Office.