In the past several weeks, the New York Police Department has been confronted with a scourge it hasn’t had to face for years: critical press coverage. Judging from recent headlines, New York’s relationship to its cops has been changing subtly, but unmistakably. Indeed, the response to this week’s heavy-handed crackdown against the Occupy Wall Street protests serves as the crescendo of a period of mounting public skepticism. But this is one threat that the NYPD simply isn’t prepared for. After a decade of being handed a privileged position in the city, New York police has forgotten how to defend itself to the public.

The New York Police Department sacrificed much on 9/11, and its reward came in the currency of public trust and admiration. Amidst widespread expectations that crime would rise and that the city would be struck again, Ray Kelly, the department’s 70-year old chief, earned massive popularity. Though he has never run for elected office and has hardly ever said anything about his politics, he has nonetheless consistently been the top choice in polls asking New Yorkers who should be the city’s next mayor. Kelly has also been a smart enough manager to recognize the advantageous terms of the new social contract that his department has been offered: Keep crime down, prevent another terrorist attack, and the NYPD would be given a free hand by the public. The police, needless to say, didn’t turn down the offer.

This new post-9/11 social contract has had its own share of successes. Unlike in Chicago, or Washington D.C., New York’s tough, off-the-map neighborhoods aren’t forced to fend for themselves; the NYPD has enough resources and clout to offer law-enforcement everywhere. But predictably, as the New York police was handed greater unchecked power, accusations of abuse around the city began to follow. Until recently, however, the department managed to evade the consequences of those abuses. And so the public’s esteem for the department mostly endured.

In the NYPD’s hard push to protect its own reputation, it had two primary accomplices. The first was the local press. The police department always wants to trade access for positive coverage, and it has an Orwellian-named Deputy Commissioner of “Public Information” to aid it in that venture. Most of the New York press seemed eager to play along during Mayor Mike Bloomberg's first two terms, as in the generally tepid press response to the city’s rough and evidently illegal handling of demonstrators (and a few passerbys rounded up with them) at the 2004 GOP convention, the shrugged-off reports of secret ticketing quotas, and the way newspapers have let Kelly’s chief spokesman off the hook on a long line of misleading or outright false assertions.

The other accomplice is Mayor Mike Bloomberg himself. Bloomberg has presented himself as a stalwart defender of the First Amendment, but there has always been a streak of authoritarianism in him. As Bloomberg’s sympathetic biographer Joyce Purnick explained, “he has no patience with civil liberties when they bump up against what he sees as a public good.” The NYPD has also benefited from Bloomberg’s penchant for measuring and quantifying all of his policy goals. With pressure from the top to meet certain quotas, the police have felt empowered and pressured into aggressively accosting citizens in poorer neighborhoods, often through so-called stop-and-frisks, in order to generate easy arrests. Police have downgraded serious crimes to keep their numbers down, and even discouraged crime reports to help ensure the record-low crime stats stay that way. So long as the numbers stay down, the police can count on the support of the mayor, and of the city's editorial boards.