Slain cop’s politicized wake is a warning | Will Bunch Newsletter

The newsletter intro is supposed to be a tad goofy, but it’s hard to write goofy when every day a new horror emerges from the bloodshed in Gaza — the kind that those of us who grew up in the aftermath of World War II hoped the world would never again see. The latest shock came Monday night as I was writing this week’s edition: the death of seven international workers for American chef José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, killed in an Israeli airstrike on their clearly marked vehicle as they delivered food to a starving population. The news came hours after we learned the U.S. will deliver $18 billion in new fighter jets to Israel. This is insane. Make it stop.

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Even in this bitterly divided nation, there are still a few things we can agree upon. Like the fact that New York City police officer Jonathan Diller, 31, a three-year veteran of the nation’s largest municipal police force, with a wife and a 1-year-old son waiting for him at home on Long Island, did not deserve to die.

It was 5:50 p.m. on March 25 when Diller and his partner undertook a routine investigation of two men in an illegally parked car in Far Rockaway, Queens. But in a nation with more guns than people, those two men were both armed. The car’s passenger — 34-year-old Guy Rivera, with a long rap sheet that included a prior conviction for attempted murder — first refused Diller’s order to leave the vehicle, then shot the officer just below his protective vest. Diller, who hailed from a family with so many cops the New York Post compared them to TV’s Blue Bloods, died in a nearby hospital.

Diller was the first NYPD officer killed in the line of duty in more than two years. Even in normal times, his murder would be a big story. In these extremely abnormal times, Diller’s death became something of a political circus, in ways that ranged from the acceptable to the appalling.

No one can deny that in a fraught era, every tragedy is political to some extent, whether it’s a Baltimore bridge collapse, a mass shooting at a Florida high school, or a wildfire on Maui accelerated by climate change. And no one could blame Diller’s family for speaking out amid their grief. “How many more police officers and how many families need to make the ultimate sacrifice before we start protecting them?” Diller’s wife Stephanie said in her eulogy.

But it wasn’t Diller’s family that asked the presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump to swing by Diller’s wake on Thursday. Instead, it was a Republican county executive, Bruce Blakeman, who invited Trump to come, seize the spotlight from Officer Diller’s sacrifice, and desperately seek to regain the “law-and-order” mantle that’s been more than a tad tarnished by Trump’s 88 felony indictments. No wonder the 45th president seized the opportunity to stand with a phalanx of cops behind him and a battery of TV cameras in front of him, declaring: “We have to get back to law and order ... We’ve gotta toughen it up, we’ve gotta strengthen it up. This should never be allowed.”

It was typical Trump to find the divisiveness in what could have been a moment of unity, but he wasn’t the only Republican to both call for stricter anti-crime laws and strategies and adopt the angry, hectoring tone of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which wrote “an NYPD officer is dead because progressives have thrown law enforcement to the wolves and given the city over to crime.”

Some used Diller’s death to flog their pet issue: undoing a New York state bail-reform law, even though er Rivera was not on bail (The driver was out on $75,000 bail over a prior gun charge,). But New York GOP Rep. Mike Lawlor insisted on X/Twitter that “the best way to honor [Diller’s] memory and respect the heroism and dedication of the men and women in blue” would be to “end cashless bail.”

The biggest problem with using Diller’s killing to score political points is that the points weren’t grounded in reality. Despite the sloganeering by police unions, right-wing politicians, and Murdoch’s Post, there’s no evidence that long-overdue bail reforms had any significant impact on crime rates. Experts now believe the spike in violent crime that did occur in 2020-21 was closely tied to the massive social disruption of COVID-19. Across the nation, crime is mostly falling to pre-pandemic, record-low levels — including in New York, where in 2024 murders have been down 25% year-over-year.

How much of the politicization of Diller’s wake was about reducing crime, and how much was attempted slam dunks on Democrats? The weekend’s strangest moment came when New York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul made a brief appearance at the viewing, but had to accelerate her exit after a confrontation with an attendee, possibly one of Diller’s relatives, that was captured on video.

You’d have thought from the vitriolic reaction that Hochul was a former fugitive from the Weather Underground and not a governor with a conservative approach to crime and justice issues, including a desire to undo many successful bail reforms and her recent move to send 750 National Guard troops, initially toting long guns, into the city subway system. Treating a governor who is simpatico, but from the not-Trump party, as an enemy of the people isn’t mourning. It’s a strain of authoritarianism.

But it took another Long Island GOP member of Congress, freshman Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, to hammer that point home this weekend when he tweeted a photo of the massive blue wall at Diller’s funeral procession of thousands of officers, with a four-word threatening message: “Don’t ever cross us.”

Look, you can support the police without supporting a police state. When did “To protect and serve” and the quaint notion of community policing morph into the “Don’t ever cross us” mantra of the warrior cop? You should take D’Esposito’s warning both literally and seriously, along with the idolization of Trump and the demonizing of Hochul. The tragedy of Officer Diller’s murder is only compounded when it’s used as a rallying cry for police-state authoritarianism.

Question: Why do American businessmen pour money into Trump’s campaign? Authoritarians don’t hesitate to take over what they want once in power. — strugles49 (@strugles49) via X/Twitter

Answer: Autocracy and capitalism are not incompatible. Indeed, much of the time they are willing partners. Classic strongman fascism, as invented by Europe’s worst leaders in the 1920s and ‘30s, tends to enshrine corporate power while declaring the groups that are anathema to millionaires and billionaires — labor unions, left-wing activists, journalists — as enemies of the people. In Nazi Germany, large corporations like Siemens and IG Farben made huge profits as their moral compasses spun out of control. Today, similar monied classes in America see Donald Trump as an anti-regulatory tax cutter and President Joe Biden as a supporter of organized labor. Of course, corporate equity will be worthless if Trump blows up the American Experiment, but most CEOs can’t see past the next quarter’s earnings.

Last week’s question about the 2024 Phillies was born of the eternal hope of spring, before an excruciating first week of watching Baseball’s Worst Bullpen™ in action. I also learned that most newsletter readers are apparently not here for the Phillies coverage, although I did hear from Anne Brennan, “A Season Ticket Holder, with a coffee/tea mug to prove it! So, yeah, I think they can win. I will be in my seat, every Sunday home game, cheering them on.” I’m with you!

📮This week’s question: Even as public opinion here in the United States and around the world turns against Israel’s sustained assault on Gaza, the Biden administration continues to supply our longtime Middle East ally with weapons, including a new $18 billion plan to send 50 jet fighters. Should U.S. military aid to Israel continue, or is it past time to cut them off? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Israel aid” in the subject line.

Now that I’m 65, I’ve got my free SEPTA pass and a license to rant about what’s wrong with the modern world. So why are we so obsessed with knowing what’s going to happen ahead of time — especially when so much of the time what we think we know is wrong? Don’t even start with today’s obsession with political polls. Or our belief that technology has mastered the weather. For two straight years, the Phillies have postponed their home opener because of the forecast, yet both times, it didn’t rain a drop. Whatever happened to just letting things happen and seeing how it turns out?

The worst of this is the sudden obsession in the world of TV sports with something called “win probability.” It’s something I’d never heard of until a couple of years ago, when stat geeks started posting graphs on social media showing the crazy swing in win probability from less than 1% to 100% when some baseball team rallied with eight runs in the bottom of the 9th. That was cool, but now in 2024, win probability is suddenly everywhere. First it was MLS matches on Apple TV, and then I tuned into ESPN’s first Sunday Night Baseball telecast and here was sportscaster Karl Ravech explaining why it was so awesome that they’d be showing the win probability throughout the season. Really? What happened to turning on a game and figuring out whether your team has a shot at winning by using that old-fashioned, low-wattage computer known as your brain?

I poked around the internet to understand why this is happening. Part of the reason, as I understand it, is promoting the underlying tech, like Google Cloud, to the kind of people who get excited about that stuff. But you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that gambling on the premises is the biggest reason. An ESPN executive explained there’s a change in how people watch sports these days, adding: “People who obviously have a wager on the game maybe have a little more thought about it as well.” How could they not, with ads for gambling sites like FanDuel and DraftKings increasingly dominating broadcasts, and both leagues and broadcasters forming other gambling partnerships?

ESPN operates its own betting site, ESPN BET, so the new focus on win probability isn’t a coincidence. The sports world is racing full-steam ahead into its embrace of gambling — even as Major League Baseball investigates what its brightest star, slugger/pitcher Shohei Ohtani, knew about his translator’s $4.5 million betting loss using Ohtani’s dollars, and as college basketball braces for a potential point-shaving scandal. That bothers me a lot, but not as much as this: When the sport becomes less about the beauty of the game and your bond with your team, and all about whether your bet comes in, baseball loses its joy.

On this date 11 years ago, or roughly midway through the Barack Obama presidency that had been inaugurated with a poster reading “Hope,” I wrote a short Attytood post hailing what felt like one small step for humankind: the Associated Press had banned using the term “illegal immigrant.” I wrote at the time that “illegal immigrant” was “a dehumanizing term that has been of no help in bringing the debate to where it belongs — to dealing with the consequences of human beings who are already here, especially millions of people who were brought here as children, with no input of their own ... Welcome to the 21st century.” Were we really once so naïve? Read “AP bans phrase ‘Illegal immigrant’” from April 2, 2013 and decide for yourself.

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