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But that’s an oversimplification of a story that’s been unfolding since long before Garner’s killing. The reality is that de Blasio and the union have been at odds since he campaigned for mayor last year on the promise to upend the city’s law enforcement status quo, including overhauling Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk program — a vow that de Blasio largely kept once in office. The police union, meanwhile, has a long history of taking public stands against New York City mayors, including law-and-order types Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani. The relationship between de Blasio and the cops wasn’t soured solely due to the mayor’s response to Garner’s death and the subsequent protests. The mayor and the NYPD were never going to get along, no matter what.

Devoid of that context, Lynch’s remarks this weekend sounded like a rare, raw moment of candor unleashed in the heat of the moment. In reality, this was simply the latest, loudest attempt to discredit de Blasio. Lynch’s ongoing efforts to undermine the mayor were caught on tape eight days earlier at a closed-door union meeting. “If they’re not going to support us when we need ’em,” Lynch said, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by Capital New York, “we’ll embarrass them when we can.” Given the chance Saturday, Lynch did just that.

The tension between City Hall and the police union predates de Blasio by at least two decades. As former New York Times reporter David Firestone has noted, Lynch and the PBA attacked de Blasio’s three predecessors almost as vociferously. It may have seemed extraordinary when, earlier this month, the union began asking officers to sign a letter requesting that de Blasio not attend their funerals in the event they are killed in the line of duty. The union, though, tried a similar move in 1997, during Giuliani’s tenure.