Police union leaders said their grievances with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio remained unresolved after meeting with him on Tuesday, 10 days after they said he was partly to blame for a gunman's deadly attack on two policemen.
De Blasio, whose turbulent relationship with his police department has become the gravest crisis of his year-old mayoralty, had called the meeting to "foster constructive and responsible dialogue," his press secretary, Phil Walzak, wrote in an e-mail.
Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, who a week ago said there was "blood on the hands" of the mayor for the policemen's deaths, said the meeting had resolved nothing.
"Our thought here today is that actions speak louder than words and time will tell," Lynch said in brief remarks to reporters outside the Police Academy building in Queens as leaders from the four other main police unions stood alongside him.
The mayor has angered police by saying he understands some of the concerns of protesters who have vilified the police as being hostile to black citizens at rallies in New York City and beyond. He also said he has often warned his biracial, teenage son about the "dangers" of police encounters.
Some police officers have taken to turning their backs on the mayor at public events in unusual displays of hostility since the two policemen were killed.
In addition, the New York Post said new weekly crime statistics from the police department were evidence that police had begun an undeclared "virtual work stoppage" in protest and out of fear for their safety.
There was a marked decline in arrests and court summonses in the last week, according to statistics released on Tuesday. Police made 1,820 arrests last week, compared with 5,370 arrests for the same week a year ago, a 66 percent drop. The number of court summonses issued for minor crimes dropped 94 percent to 300 last week, from 4,831 over the same week in 2013.
City Hall and a police spokeswoman declined to comment on whether officers had begun a slowdown.
Walzak, the mayor's press secretary, later released a brief statement saying the meeting had "focused on building a productive dialogue" but gave no specific details.
Frayed relations reached their lowest on Saturday, Dec. 27, when a black man fatally shot two policemen, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn. The shooter wrote online that he wanted to kill police officers as retribution for the deaths of unarmed black men by police, and killed himself soon after the attack.
Police Commissioner William Bratton, who joined Tuesday's meeting, has attributed some of the tension with police to unresolved negotiations on new labor contracts.
Asked about the reports of a work slowdown by police, Albert O'Leary, spokesman for the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, said: "I don't know anything about that," adding that no such instructions had come from the union.
The mayor has declined to take questions from reporters for more than a week while, his office says, he focuses on trying to "bring our city together."
Copyright Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.
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