Mayor, Faith Leaders Meet Over NYPD Death

New York City’s mayor and archbishop convened a round-table meeting of police and minority community leaders on Wednesday to diffuse tensions between the groups, days before a march to protest the death of a black man during an arrest by a white police officer.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said he hoped the meeting — which appeared noticeably less tense than a previous gathering after the death of Eric Garner, during which the controversial Al Sharpton lectured the police chief to his face — will help a city grappling with the renewal of a long-held distrust of the police in some of New York’s minority neighborhoods.

“We want this to be a transcendent moment for the city,” said de Blasio. “We’ve experienced tragedy in the death of Eric Garner. But this was not about a single incident or being mired in the past. This is about a purposeful and consistent effort forward.”

The summit came at a time when relations between police and communities of color are being scrutinized nationwide due to Garner’s death and the violent clashes between police and demonstrators after the shooting death of an unarmed black Missouri man by a white officer.

It was also a high-stakes moment for de Blasio, who has been placed in precarious political position by the controversy surrounding Garner’s death. He ran for office pledging to keep the city’s crime rate low but also vowed to improve relations between communities of color and the police.

He first convened a conference on the Garner death last month at City Hall, sitting between Police Commissioner William Bratton and Sharpton at the dais, only to draw criticism from all sides. Sharpton assailed de Blasio for not doing enough to help minority communities, while the police unions raged at the mayor for placing Sharpton on the same level as Bratton.

The mood seemed far more hopeful this time. Each speaker took pains to praise the NYPD, while Sharpton contrasted the gathering to the violence in the streets of a St. Louis suburb after the shooting of Michael Brown.

“While we still have challenges, we have changed and grown,” Sharpton said. “The problem still exists — but we can solve the problem.”

Sharpton will lead a march in Garner’s name on Saturday on Staten Island. Though he relented on his initial plan to block traffic on a major bridge, he said he plans to lead hundreds of people from the site where Garner was killed to the Staten Island District Attorney’s office.

“Religion in this great city is a cause of bringing people together, it’s a bridge,” said Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the leader of the city’s Catholic community, who called the meeting at the mayor’s behest.

This article appeared in print in the August 21st, 2014 edition of Hamodia.