The shooting of five police officers this month amid a rash of high-profile crimes would seem to mark a low point for the NYPD. But it’s not the first time police officers have felt under siege. 

Relations were tense with City Hall and the general public during the two terms of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who staked his 2013 campaign largely on a promise to rein in the NYPD.

“I am the only candidate who will do the three things that will actually end the stop-and-frisk era,” de Blasio said then during a debate on NY1.

What You Need To Know

  • The latest NYPD crisis follows years of tense relations during the de Blasio era
  • The choking death of Eric Garner at the hands of police sparked widespread outrage and protests; de Blasio described warning his son about police encounters

  • After the assassination of two NYPD officers in 2014, police turned their backs on de Blasio at the hospital and at their funerals
  • After protests led to a push to defund the police in 2020, NYPD officials said reform efforts had gone too far

That already fraught relationship with police took a dark turn in 2014 following the death of Eric Garner at the hands of police. The video images of Officer Daniel Pantaleo putting Garner in a chokehold, and, later, the decision not to charge the officers involved, sparked widespread outrage and protests. 

The mayor described warning his own bi-racial son about the police. “We’ve had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with a police officer,” de Blasio said.

Barely two weeks later, NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were assassinated while sitting in their police car in Brooklyn, a shocking crime that led to ugly finger-pointing. “That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor,” said Patrick Lynch, president of the largest police union, the Police Benevolent Association.

Officers turned their backs on de Blasio at the hospital and, later, at funerals for Ramos and Liu.

Bad blood between police officers and the mayor would persist, with protesters marshaled by the police union often tailing him around the city. But crime continued to fall over the next several years, even as the number of stops and arrests also dropped. And the City Council successfully pushed to hire 1,300 new officers in 2015.

But then came 2020 and the George Floyd protests, sometimes marked by clashes between protesters and police. “Defund the Police” became a rallying cry, and the department budget was slashed. Lawmakers took up a host of reforms. Police morale plummeted.

“I think that we have gone too far,” then-commissioner Dermot Shea said in an appearance on CNN. “I think we’ve crossed the tipping point on many levels in terms of taking tools away from the police.”

Other criminal justice reforms of recent years, like changes to bail, have only furthered tensions, all of it compounded by the crime spike of the past year and a half. The result has been a perception by many police officers that they are under siege, a perception that is beginning to feel like reality to many following last week’s shooting of Officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora.