EVERYBODY HATES Bill

Weeks into the George Floyd protests, Mayor de Blasio has alienated his constituents, the police, and even his own staff.

- David Freedlander

THE PROTESTERS lined up, hundreds deep, hoping to rally on the steps of City Hall and raise a ruckus loud enough for the mayor to hear from his corner office. They hoisted signs that read bdb: what happened to being the fairest city? and stop killing black people and no racist police. They chanted about how they wanted justice, chanted about when they wanted it, and about what they would do if they didn’t get it now: “Shut! It! Down!”

Unlike most of the tens of thousands of protesters who have poured onto city streets over the past several weeks, the members of this group could probably have just told the mayor himself, or at least sent an email. They were his former and current administration employees, people who worked in either City Hall or one of the dozens of municipal agencies that make up city government, and they were boiling mad. This made the protest pretty much unprecedented in the history of New York civil unrest.

It was the second Monday in June, a postcard-perfect afternoon, and after three long months of lockdown, the city was at last scheduled to begin the slow process of reopening. And so the protesters were screaming at an empty building. The mayor was on the other side of the East River, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, hailing the progress New York had made against covid-19, announcing new protected bus lanes and an extension of the alternate- side-parking suspension. “It’s a day to celebrate,” he said.

Meanwhile, back at City Hall, Ifeoma Ike, who had been deputy executive director of the city’s Young Men’s Initiative until 2017, was accusing the mayor of presiding over “a racist administration.”