January 2, 2015--In the Line of Duty

There is movement to repair the tattered relationship between New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the police union.

The union chief savaged de Blasio even before he took office for his pledge to limit the controversial stop-and-frisk program that de Blasio and many others claimed unduly targeted minorities. And more recently, after the chocking death of Eric Garner on Staten Island, there was more invective hurled at the mayor because he took a balanced position about the incident, including, after praising the police in general, acknowledging that he counsels his bi-racial son Dante to be extra careful when encountering law enforcement officials. What parent wouldn't.

The union president went so far as to claim that there was "blood on the mayor's hands" after two officers were brutally assassinated two weeks ago. He made the invidious connection between what de Blasio said about the strangling on Staten Island and the murder of the officers.

As a result, as well as to loom large in the public eye, the PBA president has been urging members to fill out forms demanding that the mayor not attend their funerals if they are killed in the line of duty and approved of cops booing and turning their backs on the mayor when he spoke from the heart last weekend at the funeral of the first of the slain officers.

So, with the intervention of the widely-respected police commissioner, Bill Bratton, de Blasio met for two hours on Tuesday with Pat Lynch, head of the PBA in an attempt to begin to patch things up.

Little was expected to come of this and the parties to the discussion did not disappoint--they reported no progress, no meeting of the minds.

I hope (but doubt) that there was an attempt to put things in context, very much including how dangerous a job it actually is to be a member of New York's Finest.

For example, did anyone point out that "only" 324 police officers have been shot and killed in the line of duty--324 since 1806, in more than 200 years.

This is obviously too many but no one said police work was like office work nor did anyone likely point out that in New York City more people are killed in office accidents than in police work. Or that many more firefighters than police officers die on the job each year, as do many, many more construction workers, taxi drivers or, for that sad matter, school teachers.

Again, this is not to be insensitive to the sacrifices than many policemen are asked to and volunteer to make, but let's not pretend that being a patrolman on the streets of New York is as dangerous as being a Navy SEAL on a mission in Yemen.