January 25, 1997
by MICHAEL O. ALLEN Daily News Staff Writer
Mayor Giuliani yesterday escalated his contract fight with city cops, warning rank-and-file officers not to engage in a ticket slowdown — or else.
“If a police officer absolutely refuses to do his or her job, then that police officer will have to be disciplined,” he said. “But that isn’t for me to do. That is for the police commissioner.”
It was Giuliani’s first direct threat to street cops after a week of blasting union leaders for rejecting the package of wage and benefit hikes offered by the city Tuesday.
“My advice to police officers would be: Don’t push this too far, otherwise you are going to be in serious trouble,” he said.
Giuliani’s remarks, made at a Harlem mosque, came a day after thousands of chanting, sign-waving cops took their contract fight to the streets outside police stationhouses in all five boroughs.
Dennis Sheehan, a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association spokesman, declined to comment on the mayor’s salvo.
Giuliani visited the mosque just four days after he was heckled, taunted and booed during a Martin Luther King Day celebration at a Harlem church.
It was Giuliani’s second visit to the Malcolm Shabazz Mosque, which hosted him a year ago in the wake of the fatal fire at Freddy’s Fashion Mart on 125th St. that killed eight people, including the arsonist.
Mayoral spokesman Colleen Roche said that yesterday’s trip had been planned “a couple of months ago.” The mosque’s leader, Imam Izak-El M. Pasha, is friendly with the administration.
Afterward, at a news conference on the first floor of the mosque, the mayor again blamed the PBA for lack of leadership and not doing a better job of presenting the city’s contract offer to the rank and file.
The city offered cops a five-year contract with no raises the first two years and increases totaling 15.8% in the final three years.
The city’s proposal to the PBA is 2.5% over what had been offered any other municipal union, the mayor said.
“I did that because I believe that the police officers deserve some special consideration for the risk that they take and for the job that they do,” Giuliani said.
“I can’t say yes to everything one group wants because that will take away from what other groups also deserve,” he said. “This is a fair program; it’s a balanced one. It’s a shame that there isn’t any leadership there at the PBA to explain this to the police officers.”
Giuliani said arrests are up compared to a year ago and that essential law enforcement work has not slowed down. Ticket-writing is a little trickier to gauge, and it will take about a week before the city can tell if cops are involved in a slowdown, he said.
Police Commissioner Howard Safir will monitor ticket-writing, the mayor said.
“If we have police officers that, over a period of several days, are so far off of what they should be doing, I’m sure they are going to be taking disciplinary actions,” Giuliani said.
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