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Get a link in your mailbox to your weekly NYPD Confidential column as soon as it is published! Click on the button above right on this page — or here — to sign up for this feature. Shilling for de BlasioApril 1, 2019 Once a political operative, always a political operative. How else to explain Phil Walzak’s appearance at a fundraiser for South Bend Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, where Walzak shilled for his boss, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio?
Oh, by the way, Walzak has a day job. He serves as the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for public information. His actions have caused some at Police Plaza to wonder whether he serves the department or the mayor’s political agenda. In response to questions from NYPD Confidential, Walzak emailed the following: “Let me ask you this question: is this a topic you have decided to include in your next upcoming column or are you in a consideration period?” His reticence notwithstanding, the question of his priorities is compelling because for the past 40 years or so the NYPD has prided itself on appearing to be largely free of politics. Because of that, Walzak’s appointment a year ago was controversial. PBA president Pat Lynch called it “the clearest sign yet that the de Blasio administration thinks the NYPD’s primary mission is to serve as a political tool ….” |
A former top police official said at the time, “Will he [Walzak] use the NYPD platform for the greater promotion of Bill de Blasio to the national spotlight or secondarily to help his wife achieve whatever her goals are?”
But the relationship between the department and the de Blasio administration is different from past administrations. While de Blasio has basked in the afterglow of the city’s low crime numbers, many of his actions appear to be critical of the NYPD. These include: his public criticism of a sergeant for fatally shooting an emotionally disturbed woman in the Bronx before the internal investigation was completed; his $50 million award to the so-called Central Park 5, despite the belief by top department officials that while the five had been mistakenly accused of rape, they had been beating up people in the park that night; and the mayor’s attempts to link the city’s low crime numbers to his signature policy of neighborhood policing despite qualitative evidence that it had no more to do with reducing crime than did Ray Kelly’s stop-and-frisk.
More recently, O’Neill accepted the appointment of Ernest Hart as deputy commissioner for legal matters after City Hall rejected his initial two choices. Perhaps this can be Hart’s first assignment: to determine the appropriateness of Walzak’s actions. |
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