“Bill de Blasio has failed black New York time and time again,” Hawk Newsome, the chair of Black Lives Matter’s greater New York chapter, told NY1 this morning. “It is my firm belief that if Bill de Blasio would’ve handled the Eric Garner murder correctly, then we wouldn’t be in this spot. It would’ve set a national precedent, it would’ve set a national standard, and the world of policing would’ve learned from what happened to Daniel Pantaleo.”
Newsome’s comments, referring to the NYPD officer who was fired (but never criminally charged) more than five years after fatally choking Eric Garner in Staten Island, comes after the mayor extended a curfew and doubled the NYPD response to protests in New York City.
The demonstrations, which are a response not just to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but police brutality and systemic racism at large, have been met with violence from police.
Following several days of expressing support for the police (e.g., he sympathized with officers who drove two SUVs into a crowd of protesters), Mayor de Blasio said Monday that he’s interested in repealing a law that shields police disciplinary records from the public. This reform is something police accountability advocates have long pushed for, saying it would present an opportunity to reign in police violence.
But Newsome and others now argue that after seven years on the job, the mayor has already blown his chance at stopping these patterns of police brutality.
