Mayor Bill de Blasio looked out into a sea of protesters in Brooklyn last week and delivered a bold promise: He would transform the New York Police Department. “Change that you can see and believe, because you will see it with your own eyes,” he declared.
The response from many of the black protesters was withering.
Obscenities and chants of “resign” and “I can’t breathe” filled the air at the memorial for George Floyd, drowning out Mr. de Blasio. Some demonstrators turned their backs on him as he spoke. After 90 seconds, he turned the microphone over.
Mr. de Blasio took helm of New York City as a white mayor who tied his fortunes to black constituents, perhaps more than any big-city mayor in the nation. He vowed to attack the inequities that left blacks and Latinos behind, and promised to rethink police tactics — using his biracial son, Dante, to star in a viral ad about stop and frisk.
But now, with the city in tumult after more than two weeks of protests, many of Mr. de Blasio’s black advisers and supporters have abandoned him — a blow to the mayor’s core political identity, one that threatens to taint his legacy and erode his last and most faithful constituency.
“We once thought de Blasio was with us,” said the Rev. Kevin McCall, a civil rights activist who organized last week’s memorial with Mr. Floyd’s brother. “But he flipped the script on us.”
Mr. McCall futilely pleaded with the crowd to show the mayor some respect. The problem, he said, was that the mayor had lost his credibility with New Yorkers, especially in the black community.
As the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated racial disparities in health and policing, and protesters flooded the streets to call for justice for Mr. Floyd, Mr. de Blasio made a series of missteps that has many black leaders questioning his commitment to rethinking policing and to addressing issues of inequality.
When asked about a video of two police cruisers being deliberately driven into protesters, the mayor defended the officers involved. Other images of the police in violent clashes with protesters flooded social media, but Mr. de Blasio typically said that he had not seen them.
When images of looting circulated on the news, the mayor imposed a curfew that was aggressively enforced by the police, who arrested hundreds of protesters. Mr. de Blasio further alienated many demonstrators by praising the police for exercising restraint.
Former advisers publicly questioned the mayor’s commitment to overhauling the Police Department. Hundreds of current and former mayoral staff members demonstrated against him.
And even when Mr. de Blasio called for the officer involved in Mr. Floyd’s death in Minneapolis to be immediately charged, it only underscored how the mayor had steadfastly refused to fire the officer whose chokehold led to the death of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man, in 2014.
“You can no longer hide behind your black wife and children, not anymore,” Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, said last week during an online news conference. “You’re exposed now.”
Mr. Williams, who is black, added, “We are at a time when we are asking you to do the things you said you were going to do.”
Mr. de Blasio has had his share of accomplishments aimed at reducing income inequality; early in his tenure, the mayor began a “pre-K for all” program that he has since expanded to many 3-year-olds. He has also raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour and implemented paid sick leave.
Still, the mayor has faced questions from black leaders about his commitment to overhauling criminal justice.
Under Mr. de Blasio, the Police Department fought in court to expand the interpretation of a 1970s-era law in the state’s civil code known as 50-a, so that it could shield the results of disciplinary hearings against individual officers. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Friday signed a bill to repeal the law.
The mayor also questioned a bill that would criminalize the police use of chokeholds and was opposed to closing Rikers Island, stances that he eventually changed once it became obvious they would become law.
“If he was anyone else, black people wouldn’t have expected any more than we are getting right now,” said Tyquana Henderson-Rivers, who was Mr. de Blasio’s deputy chief of staff when he was on the City Council and deputy campaign manager during his successful race for public advocate in 2009.
Ms. Henderson-Rivers, now a political consultant, said Mr. de Blasio was once someone “we thought we could trust and who understood the plight of what was happening in our communities.”
Donovan Richards, a councilman from Queens, said disappointment is the word he hears most when talking to black constituents about the mayor. “Who is the real Bill de Blasio?” Mr. Richards said. “That’s always the question.”
Mr. de Blasio has spent the last few days consulting with black leaders to try to salvage a relationship that has buttressed his political career. Last Sunday, he met at Gracie Mansion with Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner; Mr. McCall; and Iesha Sekou, the founder of the Harlem anti-violence group Street Corner Resources, among others.
During the meeting, Mr. de Blasio admitted that he had made mistakes, asked what he could do better and said that his connection to people on the ground was not as strong as it should be.
In public appearances last week, the mayor seemed to be recalibrating his message. He refined his remarks about protesters and police officers, saying that any officer who used excessive force should be investigated.
There were also concrete actions: He lifted the curfew a day early, and a police officer who shoved a protester to the ground and called her a “bitch” was arrested.
After strongly resisting the idea of cutting the Police Department’s budget, the mayor suddenly announced that he would shift money from the police to youth and social services. The mayor refused to commit to the $1 billion figure that some advocates are requesting.
The mayor has also begun appearing with his wife, Chirlane McCray, more often since the unrest.
On Tuesday, those who tuned in to the mayor’s near daily news conference found Ms. McCray reading from Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem.” In announcing the expansion of a health care initiative, she quoted from the poem, “What happens to a dream deferred?”
She appeared on the dais again with the mayor on Thursday morning to announce what the coronavirus racial equity task force is doing for “black and brown" communities.
In a conversation last week with Time 100, Mr. de Blasio and Ms. McCray highlighted the arrest of their daughter, Chiara, 25, during the protests.
It harkened back to how the mayor deployed their son, Dante, to discuss stop and frisk in a pivotal ad during Mr. de Blasio’s initial mayoral campaign; his son also wrote an op-ed about interacting with the police during the mayor’s failed presidential campaign.
“I believe he uses his proximity to blackness without giving the reform that he said he was going to give,” Mr. Williams said in an interview. “And that’s just hard to see all the time. We want to see change.”
Mr. de Blasio’s press secretary, Freddi Goldstein, defended his record.
“The mayor campaigned on a promise to bring more equity to this city. That’s what he has worked daily to do, and he’s not done,” she said. “He is committed to spending the rest of his time in office listening to communities and improving the lives of everyday New Yorkers.”
Yet the changes the mayor has proposed so far don’t go far enough, according to some black leaders, including several of the mayor’s former black advisers and allies who have used social media to criticize him.
Maya Wiley, Mr. de Blasio’s former counsel, criticized the curfew and the police violence against protesters. Richard R. Buery Jr., a former deputy mayor under Mr. de Blasio who is credited with implementing universal prekindergarten, posted a quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. criticizing white moderates.
“The black community has been his strongest base of support. Black people got him elected twice,” Mr. Buery said in an interview. “But black people around the country are tired of supporting politicians that take their communities for granted.”
Patrick Gaspard, a longtime close friend and adviser of the mayor, used Twitter to post a video of himself protesting against the curfew.
In an interview, Mr. Gaspard, president of the Open Society Foundations, said that while the mayor has significant social justice accomplishments, the police response to peaceful protesters was unjustified.
“I’m very clear that I do not believe that the signals toward reform are enough yet,” Mr. Gaspard said. “One should not be cutting summer jobs and holding the Police Department with impunity and unaccountability in a summer when powerful questions are being asked about the nature of policing.”
Other black leaders say they cut ties with Mr. de Blasio a long time ago. Kirsten John Foy joined Mr. de Blasio’s campaign for public advocate in 2009 after he made overhauling the Civilian Complaint Review Board one of his top priorities.
The mayor called for the agency, which investigates allegations of police misconduct, to be separated from the Police Department and have its own budget and more power. On his first day on the job in the public advocate’s office, Mr. Foy said Mr. de Blasio pulled back, worried that an unsuccessful effort would hurt his future political prospects.
“From that moment, I knew that he was a paternalistic progressive who appropriates the pain of the black community for his political ambitions,” Mr. Foy said.
In spite of his recent disappointment with Mr. de Blasio, Mr. McCall said his recent discussions with the mayor, as well as the mayor’s pledge to reduce the Police Department budget, have left him hopeful.
“George Floyd made him remember his commitment to black and brown communities,” he said. “Now we want to see action.”
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