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BIG CITY

Is the N.Y.P.D. at War With Itself?

The police commissioner says the force has tried to rebuild trust since Eric Garner died after a chokehold. The patrolmen’s union would rather pick a fight.

Officers respond to a call in August around the corner from where Eric Garner died in 2014.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

On Labor Day, a 48-year-old retired sergeant with the New York Police Department was found dead in a car on Staten Island, apparently having shot himself. The department has been shaken by a rash of suicides; this case would mark the 10th in 2019 and the eighth since June, already double the number of suicides the department experiences on average each year.

Given that the city has grown ever safer, the cause of the increase is unclear. But Police Commissioner James O’Neill has spoken honestly and compassionately about what he describes as a mental-health crisis, the crucial need for peer support among officers and the importance of erasing the stigma of seeking and receiving counseling. Several weeks ago, Terence A. Monahan, the chief of department and the highest-ranked uniformed police officer, said in a radio interview that the force was looking to hire psychologists who could be out in the field, and the department was also working to improve access to mental-health professionals through the city’s inadequate insurance system.

Little of this seemed to resonate with Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, the biggest police union in the world, and arguably labor’s most bellicose figurehead. In a video he posted on Twitter last month, the day after an officer killed himself in Queens, Mr. Lynch delivered his therapeutically dubious message to the union’s more than 20,000 members: “If you’re on the edge and contemplating suicide, don’t [expletive] do it, come on.’’

He then called on politicians to end ‘‘the demonization and anti-cop rhetoric,’’ and warned officers that if they did kill themselves, good friends on and off the job would feel “betrayed and abandoned — by you.

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Patrick Lynch of the Police Benevolent Association, the patrolmen’s union, called for the firing of the mayor and the police commissioner.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

To the extent that the department’s senior management has tried in recent years to align itself more with progressive values, the union leadership has pursued a different track altogether, one stuck in outdated ideologies about the pre-eminent sanctity of police work.

What has emerged is an intensifying cultural conflict. One side envisions officers and communities working in tandem in the pursuit of safety. The other sees the world outside the precinct locker room as a place of ever-present hostility and danger, a world in which an officer’s judgment should virtually never be questioned.

Undone by Mr. O’Neill’s recent firing of Daniel Pantaleo, whose chokehold led to the death of Eric Garner during an attempted arrest five years ago, the union’s delegate assembly last week unanimously approved resolutions of no confidence in Mayor Bill de Blasio and Commissioner O’Neill. What this means is that they want the governor to remove the democratically elected mayor, and they want the commissioner to resign because, as Mr. Lynch said in a statement, “Both men have displayed an appalling pattern of malfeasance and nonfeasance that disqualifies them from continuing to serve.”

The fact that civic leaders allowed Mr. Pantaleo to remain on the force and receive a salary during an interminably long investigation, enraging activists and ordinary people around the country, already seemed like a major concession to the union — to all but the leaders of the union themselves. In their view, anything short of subservience is betrayal.

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James O’Neill, commissioner of the Police Department, at the news conference where he announced the dismissal of Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who administered the chokehold that led to Eric Garner’s death.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

This was not the first time that a resolution of no confidence was issued under Mr. Lynch’s stewardship of the P.B.A. Fifteen years ago, the union called for the resignation of the commissioner at the time, Raymond W. Kelly, for “jumping to conclusions” after an unarmed African-American teenager was killed by a police officer in a dark stairwell of the Louis Armstrong Houses in Brooklyn. Commissioner Kelly had merely said that the shooting did not seem justified.

Activists and community organizers have long held that the opinions of union leaders — largely white men in middle age — are out of sync with those in the rank and file. And the administrators of the department, including the commissioner’s office, increasingly agree. The force itself has become more and more diverse over the years: within the department, 155 languages are spoken. Among its uniformed personnel, the number of white male officers has shrunk from just under 16,000 in 1988 to 9,400 today, while the number of Hispanic men has more than doubled.

And yet Mr. Lynch’s reign is essentially unchallenged: This summer he was elected to another term as president, running unopposed. After Mr. Pantaleo’s firing, he assumed a posture of fatalism, arguing that the department was ‘’rudderless’‘ and that Commissioner O’Neill would be unable to right things.

Mr. Lynch urged officers to proceed cautiously ‘’in this new reality,’‘ when, he believed, operating according to standard protocols could result in dismissals and threats to personal safety. He was, in effect, pushing for a slowdown.

By the end of August, felony arrests rate had fallen which suggested that officers had heeded his call. At the same time, declining arrest rates are just what Mr. Lynch’s adversaries among police-reform advocates are always seeking.

Mr. Lynch’s approach seems engineered to foment anger between police officers and the communities they serve at a time when that anger actually seems to be receding, when neighborhood policing strategies have sought to change the way that beat officers do business, making them look at people as human beings rather than prospective felons.

What does Mr. Lynch’s anger ultimately serve?

Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine. More about Ginia Bellafante

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section MB, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: The Police Force, at War With Itself. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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