Short Take: The Nipple of What’s Easy (original) (raw)

Ed Mullins has a way with words. A really bad way with words.

You are all a disgrace. You sit on your ass and target the NYPD all while growing up on the nipple of what’s easy. You have no clue what a NYPD officer does yet target us and disparage our integrity. One day you will dial 911 when evil is at your door and thank god for the NYPD. https://t.co/8I00FD7hny

— SBA (@SBANYPD) May 5, 2018

Mullins is the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, the second-string bargaining unit in the NYPD. And it’s his job to say whatever he must to defend the honor of his union members or get ousted and be required to work for a living.

His twit comes in response to a twit from the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the CCRB, a well-intended but largely ineffectual group of people who putatively investigate complaints against the cops and then either dismiss them or get ignored. The CCRB’s twit was cute.

#MayTheFourth Amendment protect you from unreasonable searches and seizures. And if you feel your rights have been violated by an NYPD officer, file a complaint here: https://t.co/85crBmm5PG pic.twitter.com/dD7vumSaux

— NYC CCRB (@CCRB_NYC) May 4, 2018

Hey, it was May 4, and what could be more natural for the CCRB than May The Fourth Amendment protect you? After all, the CCRB has just over a thousand followers on the twitters. The SBA has 7,700. So the CCRB tossed a cute pebble at the cops and Mullins lost it. Can you say Streisand?

But more seriously, the reaction has long been a bedrock of the NYPD playbook, the tacit threat that if you question or challenge cops, they might not be there for you. “Next time you’re in trouble, call a criminal” is the PBA’s favorite flavor.

Is the CCRB a “disgrace” for extolling the Fourth Amendment? Is Mullins right that nobody knows the burdens of cophood except cops, and the suggestion a cop might violate a person’s constitutional rights is to “target and disparage” cops? Sure, it hurts their feelings when people don’t appreciate their sacrifices of having to suffer the trauma of killing a person by mistake, or tossing black kids to make quotas, or warrantless searches because how else can they search?

What’s amazingly unsurprising is how cop culture rears its ugly head without the slightest recognition of what it reveals. Cops, love us or leave us? Cops, we may break the law but who else you gonna call? Cops, we may suck, but criminals are worse? It’s not Mullins job to raise the bar of police competence and integrity, but it is his job to promote his membership by not raining disrespect down on sergeants by revealing they are offended to the point of outrage at the suggestion that respecting the Constitution is way too much to demand of them.

Hey Sarge, are you really that bad? Mullins says so. Is he right?

And then there’s the “growing up on the nipple of what’s easy” line. What is that supposed to mean? It’s not just Mullins displaying his mad prose skillz, but an insight into the view cops have of the CCRB, and more importantly, the non-cops of the world. Children suckle at their mother’s nipple. The cops see us as children, them as our mother, our protector. And in their eyes, they make it easy for us to go about our lives, comforted by their protection.

If this sounds familiar, it should.