By Rocco Parascandola and Graham Rayman
New York Daily News
NEW YORK — The city’s top cop pushed back at a police union head calling for his resignation over a series of incidents in which cops took no action after getting sprayed by water.
Police Commissioner James O’Neill, speaking after Monday’s NYPD promotion ceremony, called sergeants’ union head Ed Mullins a “keyboard gangster.”
“Quite frankly, I haven’t seen that guy around at any department function,” O’Neill told reporters. “He’s a bit of keyboard gangster. We’re here to keep the city safe. We’re here to keep the cops safe and if you want to second guess us, think we don’t care about cops, man, you are dead wrong. You’re in the wrong business. He should re-think his position.”
Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, has derided O’Neill as “O’Kneel” on Twitter, suggesting the commissioner was condoning disrespect toward cops after videos emerged showing jeering people dumping water on sheepish police officers.
“The politically motivated agenda of Police Commissioner O’Neill puts all police officers in harm’s way and makes what was once the proudest police department in the world a laughingstock,” Mullins said in a press release on July 22.
On Monday Mullins responded to O’Neill’s comments.
“He’s a funny guy,” Mullins said of O’Neill. “I don’t have time to have beers with the Commissioner. I’m too busy defending cops he indicts for murder and uses as political pawns. The job is in the street not police functions.”
That reference was to the indictment of Sgt. Hugh Barry for fatally shooting Deborah Danner, 66, a mentally ill woman who came at him with a bat and then scissors in her apartment in 2016 saying
“The Pantaleo effect has crippled us,” Mullins added. “Take a bow.”
The remark referred to NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo who used a chokehold to subdue Eric Garner on Staten Island in 2014, leading to Garner’s death. A Staten Island grand jury and more recently the Department of Justice declined to indict the officer. A decision on whether he will keep his job is pending.
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