Bill de Blasios Bad Bet

He thought a more diverse NYPD would support a liberal mayor. Heres why it didnt.

he New York Times reported this week that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio was
caught off guard by just how deep the animosity toward him had grown among the
citys police officers. Though hed run on a platform of reforming the NYPD and
putting an end to its stop-and-frisk policy, de Blasio had apparently arrived in office
confident he would avoid any lasting discord with the rank and file. It wasnt until
police protests in the wake of the killing of two NYPD officers last month that the
mayor realized he had meaningfully lost the support of the cops.
One reason for de Blasios optimism, according to the Times, was that he and his
advisers were convinced that the demographics of the rank and file were changing
in his favor. The mayors aides, the paper reported, believed the NYPD was
morphing into a multicultural force whose members increasingly shared the views of
the diverse group of voters who elected him in a landslide in 2013.
De Blasio had enjoyed overwhelming minority support in the mayoral election,
winning 96 percent of the black vote and 87 percent of the Latino vote after a
campaign that saw him make numerous visits to black churches, forge alliances with
minority leaders, prominently feature his multiracial family in ads, and speak out
against the effect of stop-and-frisk on the citys young black men. The mayor and his
aides seem to have assumed that a police department of unprecedented diversity
would be friendlier to a proudly liberal mayor than it might have been in a previous
era.
The logic makes sense: Why wouldnt a mayor who is overwhelmingly popular with
minorities also be popular with minority cops? And the demographic shifts that de
Blasio and his aides were hanging their hopes on are real. According to the Bureau
of Justice Statistics, the percentage of sworn officers in the NYPD who were
members of a racial minority jumped from 25.5 percent in 1990 to 34.7 percent in
2000. The trend continued in subsequent years: A study by Salomon Alcocer
Guajardo, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, reported that the

percentage of NYPD officers who were either black, Latino, Asian, or Native
American had climbed to 47.9 percent by 2012. According to the NYPDs own
statistics, there have been more minorities than whites among patrolling officers
since at least 2010.
What it comes down to is that most cops are blue before theyre anything else.
Retired NYPD Detective Sgt. Joe Giacalone
The result of these trendswhich are consistent with changes at other big-city
police departments around the country, including Los Angeles and Chicagosis
that the racial makeup of New Yorks police force is getting close to that of the citys
overall population. This is progress that promises, at least in theory, to improve
relations between police and minority communities. But does it also have the
potential to make police departments more open to criticism from liberal politicians?
The de Blasio administration seems to have thought the answer was yesThat isnt to
say, however, that the changing makeup of urban law enforcement agencies isnt
having an effect on the police culture Giacalone describes. In a 2006 paper titled
Not Your Fathers Police Department: Making Sense of the New Demographics of
Law Enforcement, Stanford Law School criminal law professor David Sklansky
writes that workforce diversity is at once the most dramatic and the least scrutinized
major change that American policing has undergone over the past several decades.
Sklansky challenges the view that police behavior is overwhelmingly determined by
a homogeneous occupational subculture marked by paranoia, insularity, and
intolerance. He says that was accurate decades ago, but is less so now. In large
part because of the demographic transformation of law enforcement, Sklansky
writes, police officers are far less unified today and far less likely to have an usthem view of civilians.

I asked Sklansky to elaborate on the ways in which he believes the culture has
shifted. He wrote via email:
When police forces diversify they become less monolithic places intellectually and
culturally. The range of acceptable opinions within the department expands, as does

the range of models for what it means to be a good police officer. Minority officers
often form their own organizations, which can give voice to views different than the
ones taken by the department or by the police union. Those organizations also can
serve as a bridge to organizations outside the department interested in issues facing
minority communities. There are also important one-on-one interactions: minority
officers tend to broaden the perspective of the white officers they work with,
particularly their partners.
This might explain why the police protests against de Blasio have not been entirely
monolithicwhy only some officers elected to turn their backs to him at the
funerals last month, while others stayed facing forward. Still, it seems clear that de
Blasio miscalculated the extent to which the Police Departments growing diversity
would affect the stance that officers, and the unions that represent them, would take
toward him. He also might have underestimated the power of police culture to shape
the perspective of those who are immersed in it, no matter who they are or where
theyre from.
It was a bit of a rookie move on the part of the mayor to assume that the increased
diversity is going to lead to quick changes in the outlook and mentality of police
officers, and the way they go about their work, said Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, an
assistant professor of criminal justice at Indiana UniversityBloomington, who has
studied the views and experiences of minority police officers.
Top Comment
De Blasio fails, like white 'progressives' do on many issues, by assuming race
relations is the predominant worldview of any given non-white in this country.
More...
-Korean Kat
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Owusu-Bempah said he has interviewed black officers who had very liberal political
views when they first entered the force that quickly gave way to clannishness. As
part of the acculturation processand the toll of regularly witnessing the results of
people committing crimesthese officers came to feel suspicion toward the general

public, and to see themselves and their fellow officers as being separate from the
rest of society.
The power of the cultural allegiance that emerges from such feelings is significant,
Owusu-Bempah said, no matter how much department demographics evolve. Even
though the face of the officers has changed, theyre still operating within this world
that is deeply conservative. And insofar as demographic changes do matter, their
impact will take a long time to reveal itself.
Say youve got a bucket of cold water, and these new diverse recruits are drops of
warm water, Owusu-Bempah said. Its going to take a lot of warm drops to warm
that bucket.
. But law enforcement experts say this is a naive way to think about police culture.
The idea that race and ethnicity were going to overpower the loyalty that officers feel
toward their department and thus translate into good will for the mayor, they argue,
was nothing more than wishful thinking.
[De Blasio] figured that the demographics were in his favor because its not all white
cops anymore, I guess, Joe Giacalone, a NYPD detective sergeant who retired in
2012, told me. What it comes down to is that most cops are blue before theyre
anything else. Thats what he failed to take into consideration. He doesnt
understand the police culture, which is an us vs. them mentality.