A police officer sang the national anthem, and a video featured the mayor alongside his police commissioner.
But Mayor Bill de Blasio's State of the City speech, delivered at Baruch College on Tuesday, included only brief references to the policing issues that occasionally dominated his first year in office.
De Blasio made reforming the department a cornerstone of his mayoral campaign in 2013, and he frequently celebrated those efforts during his first year in office—until a contentious fight with police unions threatened to overshadow his other first-year accomplishments.
Today, during his hour-long speech, the mayor focused on housing and economic issues, making only a single reference to “our NYPD,” and one to “our courageous men and women in uniform.”
“We ended the overuse of stop-and-frisk, reducing stops by over 75 percent," he said. "And since we instituted our new marijuana policy just months ago, arrests are down almost 65 percent. At the same time, thanks to our courageous men and women in uniform, we’ve not only kept New York City safe, we made it even safer. Our NYPD officers helped bring the city’s crime rate to an all-time low, with the smallest numbers of murders, robberies burglaries in our history.” (As of last Sunday, murders and shootings are up, compared to last year.)
That was slightly less strident than his comments in last year's State of the City speech, when he spoke about correcting "the wrongs spurred by a broken policing policy," and about sending "a message to New Yorkers of every background that we will respect equal protection under the law."
De Blasio also spoke briefly on Tuesday about his traffic safety plan, Vision Zero, but then did not mention policing issues again.
Before the speech, a highlight reel of de Blasio’s first year covered the period from his inauguration, on the first day of 2014, through Dec. 10, when the city “secured approval to replace payphone with LinkNYC—the world’s largest, fastest free municipal Wi-Fi network.”
That was ten days before two NYPD officers were killed in Brooklyn, which touched off a public battle between police unions and the mayor. Officers turned their back on de Blasio at three public events, and private meetings failed to resolve the situation, as statistics showed a sharp reduction in low-level arrests and summonses.
Since then, de Blasio has been more unambiguously pro-police in his public comments, and in an interview with the Associated Press last week, the mayor said he felt he had successfully put the police crisis behind him, enabling him to focus on other critical parts of his agenda.
(A spokesman for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association declined to comment on de Blasio’s speech.)
Councilman Rory Lancman of Queens said he was happy with todays speech and its limited references to police issues.
“He hit the right theme, which is we're going go keep driving crime down and keep reducing ineffective policing strategies that needlessly generate community friction," Lancman said.
Kirsten John Foy, the northeast regional director of the National Action Network—founded by Rev. Al Sharpton, a de Blasio ally—said he was disappointed in the mayor’s speech.
“In the context of a very strong speech about police-community relations made by the mayor at the House of Justice on King Day, the decision to avoid the very difficult and poignant issue of police and community relations in the State of the City speech was disappointing to say the least.”
“Not speaking about it amplifies the issue," he added.
Another reform organization, Justice League NYC—whose spokeswoman, Tamika Mallory, used to work for Sharpton—said it was "outraged that, at a time of high tensions, Mayor de Blasio conspicuously ignored the most sensitive and pressing issue facing our city - that of police and community relations.
"The Mayor's glaring omission during the State of the City address is deeply troubling and concerning," the statement continued. "He sent a clear message today that the Mayor’s Office is not prioritizing the urgently needed reforms for how the NYPD polices communities of color. This is a moment of conscience. We simply cannot stand for this, and no leader in the city—elected or otherwise—should either.”
Joo-Hyun Kang, executive director of Communities United for Police Reform, an advocacy group, questioned the accomplishments cited by de Blasio in his speech, and said that poor New Yorkers and people of color are still being profiled disproportionately by officers, even if the number of stops has been reduced.
“What we see is that the reporting of stop-and-frisk might be down, but actually the continued profiling, not only racial profiling but also the racial and gender profiling, racial and sexual orientation profiling, profiling of homeless people, that’s continuing on a daily basis,” he told Capital in a phone interview.
Last year, de Blasio announced officers would confiscate and issue summonses people for possessing up to 25 grams of marijuana in public view, rather than arrest them. Today, Kang said, “the decrease in arrests of course is a good thing, on face value, but just moving them over to summonses doesn’t address any of the underlying racial profiling that is the driver” of those police encounters.
Before de Blasio spoke, a small group of protesters gathered outside Baruch. Led by Josmar Trujillo of “New Yorkers Against Bratton,” they held signs that said, “Broken Windows, Broken Lives,” and chanted,”Mayor de Blasio, stop hiding behind your son’s afro; Broken Windows has got to go.”
Bratton, who de Blasio has often called the best police official in America, sat in the front row for de Blasio’s speech. After the speech, he chatted with the mayor and actor Steve Buscemi, before leaving the venue without speaking to reporters. A spokesman did not immediately respond when asked for the commissioner's reaction to the speech.