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By Andrea Peyser
January 9, 2015

De Blasio is leading this city into ruin by not having cops' back

Dec. 23 marked a banner day in the Peyser/Phillips household. My daughter, Eliza Phillips, turned Sweet 16.

This was an excuse for her parents to enjoy mountains of cake (and a few nips of Scotch.) But it also brought us a sense of extreme anxiety. For soon my kid will choose a career. But like millions of parents, infamously including Mayor de Blasio, this seemed as good a time as any for me to sit my child down and give her “the talk.’’

I warned her — Do not join law enforcement.

This makes me sad.

Just as de Blasio sat down with his son, Dante, who is a year older than Eliza, for his special kind of “talk’’ — he warned the half-black young man about the phantom dangers he faces at the hands of police — I felt an urgent need to answer the mayor's reprehensible rap.

I warned my daughter, who is white, about the very real dangers she might face in the employ of a department whose people the mayor has slimed.

In a news conference and on TV, de Blasio last month said he and his wife, Chirlane McCray, have drilled a message into Dante's head.

“Look, if a police officer stops you, do everything he tells you to do,’’ is how de Blasio described a parent-child lecture on ABC News.

“Don't move suddenly. Don't reach for your cellphone,’’ he said he told Dante. “Because we know, sadly, there's a greater chance it might be misinterpreted if it were a young man of color.

“It's different for a white child. That's just the reality in this country.’’

Forget for a moment that Dante de Blasio, along with others in his family, is protected by a police detail whose members would take a bullet for him. It isn't known if ­Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the madman who shot to death two cops in Brooklyn, then himself, even knew of de Blasio's brazen animus ­toward police. And I'll concede that the statement that de Blasio had “blood on his hands,’’ made by Patrolmen's Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch, was over the top.

But it's clear that de Blasio does not have the backs of our men and women in blue, scores of whom ­silently turned their backs on the mayor as he walked into the hospital where the shot officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, were taken. And hundreds turned their backs on the image of the mayor as it was broadcast outside the funerals of the murdered cops, both posthumously promoted to the rank of detective.

But the rejections have drawn only whining from de Blasio as well as from Police Commissioner William Bratton. De Blasio called the back-turning display “disrespectful’’ — to the families of the slain cops. Mayor de Blasio, you have a problem.

It started during the mayoral campaign when de Blasio vowed to end the police practice of stop, question and frisk, which he suggested was racist, and continued last summer when he invited the race-baiting Rev. Al Sharpton to sit front and center at a forum on police-community relations at City Hall.

It continued when he said nothing about some two dozen elected City Council members who staged a “die-in’’ on the steps of City Hall to protest a Staten Island grand jury's refusal to indict a cop accused of killing Eric Garner with a chokehold.

The fear and disgust felt by cops is evident. The number of arrests in this city has dropped an astonishing 66 percent during the week beginning Dec. 22, 2014, compared with a year earlier, and by 56 percent the following week, compared with the same period 12 months before. At the same time, the number of summonses issued for parking violations and minor crimes citywide has plunged more than 90 percent!

Yet a powwow held last month among de Blasio, Bratton and the five police union heads has solved nothing. A union sit-down with Bratton, but not de Blasio, this week also went nowhere.

I fear for this city. My daughter should know that in this “climate,’’ now is not a good time to become a cop. I got the phrase from psycho Brooklyn Judge Laura Johnson who, days after the Liu and Ramos assassinations, freed without bail two men accused of threatening to kill cops. Then Johnson was reappointed to the bench for ­another year by her ideological twin, de Blasio.

But Judge Johnson used “climate’’ to explain that there currently exists far too much anger among the citizenry aimed at those who would harm men and women in blue. So she freed the accused cop haters — in a bid to level the playing field in favor of those who would do police harm.

Mayor de Blasio, this is no way to run a city.