New York City's largest police union had not endorsed a candidate for president in decades when its leader, Patrick J. Lynch, stepped to the lectern last month at President Donald Trump's golf club in New Jersey."Mr. President, we are fighting for our lives out there," Lynch said, in
New York City’s largest police union had not endorsed a candidate for president in decades when its leader, Patrick J. Lynch, stepped to the lectern last month at President Donald Trump’s golf club in New Jersey.
The tableau of the four union leaders standing together with Trump reflected a larger truth about the upper ranks of the city’s police unions: Even as the Police Department has become more diverse and is now less than half white, the unions continue to be run mostly by white conservatives who live in the suburbs and increasingly echo the president’s views.
Story continuesWhile some Black and Hispanic police fraternal groups objected to Lynch’s endorsement of the president, there is no evidence of a broader backlash among rank-and-file members to the announcement of support, nor to Lynch’s speech last month praising the president at the Republican National Convention.
As they have done for years, the union leaders have set themselves against the momentum for change. They have fought a city law that made it a misdemeanor for police officers to use chokeholds during arrests, and tried to stop a state law that makes officers’ disciplinary records public. And they have fiercely opposed a state law ending the use of cash bail for most nonviolent offenders in New York.
Instead, the officials pointed out, Lynch held a news conference near City Hall with his fellow union leaders, lashing out at local politicians. “For our legislators to demonize police officers, as if we’re the problem, as if we broke the windows, as if we caused the violence, that is absolutely outrageous,” Lynch said.
“The secret of our solidarity isn’t complicated,” he said. “No matter where we live or what we look like, police officers’ concerns are the same.” “Who are the unions shot callers?” asked Detective Felicia Richards, who leads the Guardians Association, a fraternal organization for Black officers. “It’s pretty much still a good old boys club.”
The police union’s embrace of Trump has been gathering steam all year, but it came to a head last month when Lynch, a registered Democrat with conservative views, spoke at the Republican convention. So far, Lynch has been the only police union leader in New York to endorse Trump, but Edward D. Mullins, who runs the sergeants union, and Paul DiGiacomo, the head of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, have both come close.
As early as February, Mullins visited the White House to talk about the “plight of police officers in NYC,” as he wrote on Twitter:In the months that followed, Mullins went to war with de Blasio, blaming him for a litany of local crimes and launching personal attacks that culminated one day late last month when he demanded the mayor resign by “sundown.”
Not quite half — or 47% — of the city’s uniformed officers are white, police officials say. Twenty-nine percent are Hispanic and 15% are Black. Asian officers make up 9% of the force. As for politics, voting records indicate that a majority of union leaders — 68% — are registered Republicans. Twenty-six percent identify as Democrats, the records show, and 5% have no party or another affiliation.
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