How Dare Mayor de Blasio Tell New Yorkers To Submit to the NYPD

[n2doc]

By Natasha Lennard

August 17, 2014

This week, Mayor Bill de Blasio asked New Yorkers to be entirely irrational. With some incredulity-provoking remarks, the mayor did the equivalent of asking a well-reasoned atheist to get on their knees and pray anyway. He asked us to trust the police.

Specifically, de Blasio advised that New Yorkers should always submit to arrest when an NYPD officer decides to detain them. "When a police officer comes to the decision that it's time to arrest someone, that individual is obligated to submit to arrest," he said during a press conference in Harlem. "They will then have every opportunity for due process in our court system."

The problems with his suggestion are myriad. Firstly, he delivered them in the midst of national furor over the police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black young man in Ferguson, Missouri, and just a few weeks after NYPD cops strangled Eric Garner to death on a Staten Island sidewalk.

In the last ten days, cops in Los Angeles killed two unarmed men — Ezell Ford, who suffered from mental illness, was reportedly lying on the ground when shot dead by the LAPD and, a week earlier, Omar Abrego was apparently fatally beaten by police during a traffic stop. With these deaths being just the latest incidents in a brutal pantheon, de Blasio's comments did the tacitly violent work of victim blaming.

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https://news.vice.com/article/how-dare-mayor-de-blasio-tell-new-yorkers-to-submit-to-the-nypd

[PoliticAverse]

1. 'don't resist arrest' is the same advice the ACLU gives you. n/t