Rep. John Conyers brought his con gressional road-show to New York yesterday, staging a “public forum” meant to sow racial division here and undermine faith in the NYPD.
Here’s hoping Conyers (D-Mich.) and his gang fall flat on their faces in their attempt.
Indeed, the locals who joined in the charade – Reps. Gregory Meeks, Jerrold Nadler, Anthony Weiner, Ed Towns and Charles Rangel (no NYPD representatives attended) – ought to be ashamed.
But then, no one should be surprised to see these pols rushing to grandstand at the city’s expense – and virtually turning over the event to Al Sharpton.
Indeed, the forum might as well have been held at Sharpton’s headquarters – with the ever-mischievous reverend orchestrating witnesses and spouting his usual (often incomprehensible) anti-cop rants.
Ostensibly, the event was a fact-finding session in the wake of the acquittal of three NYPD detectives in the Sean Bell shooting.
In reality, it was little more than a one-sided diatribe against the “racist” police, who constitute an “occupying force” in minority neighborhoods and whose shooting of Bell was not a tragedy but a “crime” – no matter what the law and a state Supreme Court justice have to say about it.
Some “fact-finding” session – where facts don’t matter one bit to those who conduct it and those who just want to vent. Indeed, in that sense, it was little more than a repeat of Conyers’ last anti-NYPD circus, back in 1983 – when he claimed that “no one can question” New Yorks’ “systemic and racially motivated” police brutality.
It wasn’t true then – and it’s even less true now.
But that didn’t stop even some members of the congressional panel from arguing for full-time Justice Department oversight of the NYPD – a wholly ridiculous proposal, albeit one that has topped anti-cop advocates’ agenda for years.
In 1983, then-Mayor Ed Koch charged that Conyers’ “premature and politically motivated judgments recklessly injured the reputation of the department and may have polarized the city.”
A quarter-century later, nothing has changed.