EXCLUSIVE: 'Let's be real the city is in freefall.' NYPD union boss blames 'feckless' Bill de Blasio and his 'imbecilic' police reform laws for the Times Square shooting and turning NYC into a Wild West frontier town
Edward D. Mullins is the president of the 13,000 member NEW York City Sergeants Benevolent Association. He has been a member of the New York City Police Department since 1982 and president of the SBA since 2002.
Early in his career he was assigned to the 13th Precinct on Manhattan's East Side and nearly ten years later was promoted to detective, assigned to the 10th Precinct in Manhattan's Chelsea area.
Promoted to Sergeant in 1993, he was assigned to the 19th Precinct on Manhattan's Upper East Side and later the Detective Bureau in Brooklyn South, where he served in the 67th Precinct Detective Squad, Special Victims Squad, and the Kings County District Attorney's Office. Mullins, 59, was raised in Greenwich Village.
The weekend shooting of three people in New York City's Times Square tells you all you must know about life in the Big Apple under the stewardship of Mayor Bill de Blasio and the legions of feckless elected officials and enablers dangerously masquerading as leaders.
Police officer Alyssa Vogel heard reports of shots fired at West 45th Street and Broadway over the Mother's Day weekend.
She hurried to the scene with nary a thought for her own personal safety. That's what cops do on a daily basis.
She observed fellow officers treating two wounded bystanders. One victim, a 23-year-old female tourist from Rhode Island, was shot in the leg.
Prior to the police rendering assistance, she was heard screaming: 'I don't want to die. I have a two-year-old. Please help me, I'm shot. Please help me.'
No one came to her assistance.
Sergeants Benevolent Association president Ed Mullins (pictured in 2017) has blasted Mayor Bill de Blasio's lenient stance on crime amid a troubling spike in gun violence in New York City
Three people were wounded over Mother's Day weekend after a gunman opened fire in the heart of Times Square in broad daylight
Instead, amid today's 'defund and denounce the police' culture, scores of bystanders took videos of the bloodshed. It is likely that the victim will have the bullet lodged in her leg for the rest of her life.
The other victim was a 43-year-old New Jersey woman who was shot in the foot.
When officer Vogel was advised there was another victim up the block, she raced to that scene and encountered a four-year-old girl who had been shot in the leg.
She quickly perused the girl's body for other injuries, tied a tourniquet around her leg to stem the bleeding, hoisted her into her arms, and ran through a crowd to the nearest ambulance. The only thing on her mind was saving the child's life.
This was the second incident in a month where a tourist was hit by random gunfire while walking in the Times Square area.
Just weeks earlier in April, a 44-year-old Kansas man who was visiting New York for the first time was struck in the shoulder on the corner of West 38th Street and Eighth Avenue. He was returning to his hotel after attending a baseball game. He won't be visiting the city again any time soon.
Because these incidents occurred in an area universally regarded as the Crossroads of the World, they received global news coverage. Mayor de Blasio thought it was prudent to weigh in on the matter.
Feigning indignation on the latter incident, he called it 'horrible and unacceptable' before adding with a flourish, 'this kind of thing should not happen in our city. There's a lot of ways we can address it.'
Then, New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang, who prior to this incident had said nothing in defense of law enforcement amid the incessant 'defund the police' clamor, quickly weighed in at a hastily arranged press conference.
'The truth is New York City cannot afford to defund the police,' he said while also mentioning that he lived nearby.
Police officer Alyssa Vogel has been praised for her heroic actions during the shooting after she was seen saving a four-year-old girl who was shot in the leg
One of the victims, Wendy Magrinat, 23, from Rhode Island, told how onlookers began filming as she pleaded for help after being shot in the leg. She is expected to survive
The only other time he voiced such concern for a victim, was the recent random stomping of an elderly Asian woman by a man on lifetime parole for killing his mother.
In that press conference, he also mentioned that he lived nearby.
As of May 2, more than 460 people have been shot in the city this year, compared with 259 last year and 239 the year before.
The fact that over 90 per cent of those victims were Black or Hispanic, and most of the shootings occurred north of 96th Street in Manhattan, or in distressed neighborhoods throughout the city's outer boroughs, makes the implicit bias of these purported leaders glaringly apparent.
There has been no outrage from Yang.
Nor was there any outrage from anyone in the political establishment when a one-year-old boy was shot and killed while sitting in a stroller at a July 4 barbecue last summer.
There was also eerie silence when a six-year-old witnessed her father being gunned down while she was holding his hand as they crossed a Bronx street. Both were African American.
The suspect in the shooting of the Kansas man is in custody. Not surprisingly, he has a long criminal history despite being just 21 years old.
The 31-year-old suspect in the latter shooting has been identified. He, too, is a career criminal who was walking the streets despite being arrested last year for the random attack of a stranger. In this incident, he was trying to kill his brother over a personal dispute.
There is little doubt that he will soon be arrested and indicted for the shooting of three innocent people.
Hopefully, he will be held on high bail because his offenses are some of the few crimes that are still eligible for bail in de Blasio's dystopian New York.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has been blamed over New York City's apparent descent into lawlessness, with critics accusing him of giving into public pressure to 'defund the police'. In a press conference held in the wake of the shooting, mayoral candidate Andrew Yang (right) admitted the city could not 'afford' to defund the police
Mullins also took aim at NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea (pictured in the wake of the shooting) accusing him of shedding his 'integrity and morality by signing on to the mayor's runaway agenda'
As far as I am concerned, there are scores of unindicted co-conspirators who should also face justice for their role in the city's descent into lawlessness.
Let's start with Governor Andrew Cuomo, who never met a murderer he did not want to parole, Mayor de Blasio, who never passes up an opportunity to bash the police, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who along with many cohorts was the chief architect of bail and police 'reform' laws which have rendered the cops all but impotent and turned New York into an urban facsimile of a Wild West frontier town.
His 'diaphragm law' disallows cops from putting pressure on a suspect's torso, even if they are violently resisting arrest.
Then there are de Blasio enablers such as Police Commissioner Dermot Shea, who like his predecessors William Bratton and James O'Neill, are career police officers who shed their integrity and morality by signing on to the mayor's runaway agenda that is characterized by unfathomable ineptitude and downright lunacy.
In doing so, they defied every oath they ever took as guardians of public safety.
Words have consequences and, since first taking office in 2014, de Blasio's incendiary anti-police rhetoric has already resulted in three police officers being executed while sitting in police vehicles, Molotov cocktails being lobbed at officers and into police vehicles, armed assaults on police facilities, cops being pelted with debris, and wholesale damage to police and public property.
In a scathing tweet in the wake of the shooting, the SBA urged tourists to avoid New York City and visit Florida instead
Despite these officials presenting themselves as beacons of hope for communities of color amid a mushroom cloud of systemic racism, they have all been notably silent despite there being a steady increase in violent crime since the 'reforms,' including a 166 per cent uptick in shootings from April 2020 to the same month this year.
The 2020 'reform' package has done nothing but kneecap the police and increase violent crime to levels not seen since the early 1990s.
All the progressive changes meant to even the playing field for minority residents has only resulted in scores of Black and Hispanic becoming victims of crime.
The mayor had the audacity to say that the recent Times Square shootings would have no negative effect on the return of tourism to the community.
His assertions were immediately shot down by scores of business owners who have been crushed – first by the pandemic and now the skyrocketing violence in the area.
Retired NYPD captain Joe Lisi is a successful actor and business owner. His eatery, Bar Dough, is located on West 46th Street on Restaurant Row.
The entire neighborhood was closed after the Times Square shootings and Lisi said he and fellow restaurateurs are experiencing hundreds of reservation cancellations because out-of-town patrons who they depend on are afraid to come to the city.
In a highly controversial move last July, city officials ultimately agreed to cut $1billion from the NYPD budget amid mounting pressure from protesters and police reform activists. But Mullins believes the 'reform' package has done nothing but kneecap the police and increase violent crime to levels
Shootings in New York City are now at their highest levels since 1998. The NYPD has blamed the uptick on Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio cutting their budget and letting thousands of criminals out of jail early
Since the 'reforms,' Lisi said the neighborhood is overrun with aggressive, homeless, mentally ill panhandlers who are emboldened enough to harass his patrons. Several local denizens even 'moved in' to his outdoor dining area.
Lisi, a lifelong New Yorker and former Marine, is not easily intimidated but said he no longer feels safe at his restaurant or while walking his dog near his West Village home. For the first time in many years, he carries his gun when going outside.
Edward D. Mullins has been a member of the New York City Police Department since 1982 and president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association since 2002
If he has those concerns, imagine the fear that ordinary people are experiencing, especially those who must rely on public transportation where there have been almost daily random subway shootings, slashings, and bashings. Even conductors are not immune from being attacked.
Let's be real. The city is in a freefall and there is no one in charge. The politicians who enacted the imbecilic reform laws are too proud or embarrassed to admit that they made a mistake.
They heaped upon the citizenry the most dangerous and deadly failed social experiment in the history of a once great city.
As the city burns, more lives are lost, and devastated families mourn, these buffoonish 'leaders' continue to say the police are the problem – not the solution.
The reality is there is no police department in the world that is held more accountable than the NYPD.
The department has already proved it is capable of herculean feats. Until the de Blasio era, it was viewed by many as the finest law enforcement agency in the world.
Today's elected officials and police leaders are now akin to the doomed captains on the Titanic.
They are dancing, zigging and zagging - as the music plays and the ship sinks. How many people must die before someone steps up and takes charge?
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