Up Close and Personal
Sergeants Benevolent Association President Edward Mullins has big plans to build bridges with the community. (Photo: NY1 screengrab)
Ed Mullins, the president of the NYPD Sergeants union has come up with a plan to try to bridge the rift between the NYPD and communities of color in New York City—and between police departments and the neighborhoods they patrol nationwide.
According to the New York Observer, his proposal is ambitious and includes proposals like having the police hold free sports clinics and athletic leagues, nationwide expansion of the “Blue Christmas” program the Sergeants and Patrol Officers unions in New York launched in 2013, where cops deliver holiday gifts to families in the poorest precincts of New York.
“We try to make a better Christmas for people who don’t have it,” Mullins said. “And I think that’s something that brings trust.”
Mullins said he developed his ideas after meeting with black leaders like Dr. Alveda King—niece to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—conservative celebrity and rumored 2016 GOP presidential contender Dr. Ben Carson, and Rev. A.R. Bernard, a Brooklyn pastor and former advisor to the Bloomberg administration. The police union leader said his aim was to increase and improve interactions between police and minority civilians, which have become tense since the killings of unarmed black men Michael Brown and Eric Garner in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island last year.
“It’s really fracturing the country, and the more I watch what’s going on, nobody is looking at how to build bridges,” Mullins said. “The bottom line is that there’s huge distrust.”
The SBA head also said he hopes to create a series of public service announcements to run on YouTube and, hopefully, on television that would explain police training to the public. Mullins argued that misunderstanding of how police are taught to act and react in certain situations is behind much of the present distrust and hostility.
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