Honestly, Very Respectfully, Mr. Mayor, Suck My Dick

Today, to cap off a week of brutal police violence against protestors, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio “very respectfully” took a few hours of questions from journalists and the public, first in a press conference and then on the weekly “Ask the Mayor” segment of WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show. His stance, as it has been since his city erupted in protest over police brutality against black people and parallel, completely foreseeable instances of police violence against black people along with those who support them, is that New Yorkers’ feelings are valid but the things they are seeing are not real. I tried to call into the Brian Lehrer show, but couldn’t get through. If I had, I would have told de Blasio to suck my dick, and maybe that I hoped to see him in hell.

De Blasio, for those unaware, is the Democratic and self-proclaimed progressive leader of New York City, a man who allegedly ran on a platform to reform the city’s racist, paramilitary police force but whose campaign pitch could be more accurately described as being a white man with a black wife and black kids. Having failed to stand up to the NYPD or its union at any moment during his term, the wildly unpopular mayor and, bafflingly, one-time presidential candidate has dug in further to such cynical platitudes, telling his constituents that while he may believe that they have feelings about the police, those feelings are mere historical echoes or the work of biased reporting and certainly couldn’t represent fact. Asked directly on live radio whether there was a problem with how the NYPD was dealing with protesters, the mayor answered, as he has before: “No.”

Over the last few days, New York’s police force has driven its SUVs into crowds of peaceful protestors, pulled residents off of their bikes to beat or detain them—in one prominent case after a silent vigil—and rushed demonstrators with no apparent provocation in several violent incidents documented on video or in the press. “Shoot those motherfuckers,” one officer said on a scanner during a night of protest, to which another officer warned by way of answer, “Don’t put that on the air.” A delivery worker was arrested this week while trying to do his job. Cops are reportedly taping over their badge numbers and turning off the cameras that New Yorkers were once assured would curb the force’s complete lack of consequence. Where other mayors, realizing that curfews mostly energize protesters and give police wide permission to criminalize dissent, have lifted their nighttime bans on outdoor activity, Bill de Blasio has continued to try to close his city at 8 at every night.

Last night, in the Bronx, NYPD officers surrounded and charged a couple hundred peaceful protestors, many of whom, according to the New York Times, were simply attempting to disperse. Many were beaten; one left the scene in a stretcher. And these are just the moments caught on the record, the demonstrations attended by the press or in which a cellphone camera is trained in the right place at the right time.

“I believe that you believe what you’re saying,” De Blasio told a Gothamist reporter who’d been in the Bronx last night watching peaceful protesters—including legal observers and medics—clubbed and hauled off to jail. “I’m not hearing objectivity in your question,” the mayor responded when famously balanced personality Brian Lehrer asked if it was possible to make a distinction between people who were nabbing property and those who were marching with their hands in the air. There was “evidence violence was about to happen,” the mayor said in reference to multiple recorded instances of his constituents being brutalized by the cops for no apparent reason at all.

“Honestly, Brian, very respectfully, you have spent very little time on the fact that New York City guarantees health care for all its people,” the self-proclaimed progressive said as he meandered and dodged his way through answers to questions about the only thing on New Yorkers’ minds. Honestly, very respectfully, suck my dick, Bill de Blasio, if all you can do is get someone to the hospital for a sliding scale fee when an officer beats them senseless after pulling them randomly off of the street.