This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has hit back at both the media and police unions for trying to “divide” people in the aftermath of the murder of two police officers in Brooklyn on Saturday.

During a press conference at NYPD headquarters on Monday, de Blasio was asked by a reporter whether he would allow his children to attend protests against killings by police that some people claim were indirect causes of the officers’ murder. When the reporter recited a chant he’d heard that compared the NYPD to the Ku Klux Klan, de Blasio appeared to lose patience.

“No, of course not,” he said.

“What are you guys gonna do?” de Blasio asked, his arms wide. “Are you gonna keep dividing us?”

He pointed to recent marches, emphasising that 25,000 people had protested “totally peacefully”, and the NYPD protected them.

“What you managed to do is pull up the few” bad examples, de Blasio said.

Also at the press conference, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said that he had spoken to the leaders of the five biggest police unions – which would include Pat Lynch, who said on Saturday that the blood of the murdered officers was on the hands of the protesters, and “on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the Mayor” –and that they had agreed to stand down their “dialogue” until after the funerals of the two officers.

“First we need to honour the families [of officer Ramos and officer Liu] without getting into a back-and-forth,” the mayor said.

De Blasio did say, however, that he thought what Lynch said “was a mistake, and it was wrong.”

“Do some police officers not like the mayor? Guaranteed,” said Bratton. “But you guys have been around a while. Can you point to one mayor that has not been battling the police unions? You can’t. Not one.”

“Union leaders are free to say what they feel,” Bratton said. “Morale in policing, it goes up, it goes down.”

De Blasio said he would “keep reaching out to those who serve this city.”

“They are people with a lot of different backgrounds,” he said. “There are 35,000 people [in the NYPD]. The way I see it is, some people feel one way, some people feel another way.”

“I need to support them no matter what.”