Bill de Blasio appeared to realize on Monday morning what was immediately clear on Saturday, when video of two NYPD SUVs accelerating into a group of protestors was widely circulated. It was one instance of many, in Brooklyn and across the country, of cops perpetrating the kind of violence that was being protested after the white police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd in Minneapolis last week.
“There is no situation where a police vehicle should drive into a crowd of New Yorkers,” de Blasio said in his press conference on Monday, singing a different tune than he had when first asked about it. “If those protestors had just gotten out of the way we wouldn’t be talking about this situation,” he had said on Saturday night. You could hear, in another comment on Sunday, him sort of backing into his current conclusion: “I didn’t like what I saw one bit,” he said, although he maintained that police had overall acted with “tremendous restraint.” In addition to the SUV attacks, cops across the city chased down protestors, pepper sprayed them, beat them with batons, and in at least one case pulled a gun on them.
Lateness, whether in terms of ideas or his daily schedule, has long been one of the signatures of de Blasio’s mayoralty. The morning trips to the Park Slope YMCA from Gracie Mansion on the Upper East Side, SUVs idling outside, and all the strained rationalization of them, have been an enduring emblem of his tenure. That’s in addition to all the times, like at the memorial service for Rockaways air crash victims in 2014, he just didn’t make it on time. His tweets on Sunday night were another kind of document of his lens into the city:
While he claimed to be on-site, these accounts, in their wide-eyed, who-me? tenor, contradicted plenty of other footage that showed more police brutality at these protests. De Blasio’s daughter Chiara was arrested for protesting on Sunday night; he said the next morning that he found out after his staff got a media inquiry about it.
“I think he’s living in an alternative universe at this moment in history,” City Council member Donovan Richards told Politico.