Former Mayor Bill de Blasio was a troubled and ungrateful leader of the Big Apple, who would often go on “power trips” — putting his disdain for police officers on full display, one of the cops on the mayor’s detail says.
Former NYPD officer Katrina Brownlee dedicated nearly a fifth of her newly released memoir — “And Then Came the Blues” — to her years on the former mayor’s security detail, describing her complicated relationship with de Blasio as an ego-centric but insecure public persona and as a “genuinely caring person” in private.
“One thing that was always difficult for me to reconcile was de Blasio the man versus de Blasio the mayor,” Brownlee writes.
In one example, Brownlee skewered the mayor’s staff, packed with “white millennials” who talked trash about their boss while using the administration as a resume builder. But she also attacked de Blasio for not being grateful to New Yorkers for electing him to a second term.
“As much as I didn’t approve of the staffers’ nasty comments, I also didn’t feel sorry for the mayor,” she wrote. “He was incapable of managing his staff in a way that encouraged their growth or advancement and wasn’t remotely interested in creating new leaders.
“This pattern was evident at every level of his administration, and especially at the token holiday party he threw every year as a half-assed gesture of gratitude for the security detail,” she continued. “He would make a speech about how important we were and thank us for all we did for him, but the very next day he wouldn’t even say good morning.”
Brownlee also got the impression that the former mayor, who had a contentious relationship with the NYPD since the start of his administration, wasn’t too fond of cops.
“I also sensed that the mayor generally did not like police officers,” she wrote, adding, “Although he never disrespected me directly, he was so insecure about his own status that he couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else around him having power.”
“Once, when de Blasio was talking on the phone on the grounds of city hall, a uniformed cop posted there briefly took off his hat, and de Blasio, on one of his typical power trips, took it as such a gesture of disrespect that he called the officer’s sergeant to complain,” she recalled in one of the only specific examples.
In the early days of de Blasio’s first term, hundreds of NYPD cops turned their backs on the mayor during a funeral for a pair of officers who were executed on the street, while union officials blamed de Blasio for the slaying.
During her time on the force, Brownlee started her mayoral security stint on first lady Chirlane McCray’s detail before suddenly being removed with little reasoning.
“All the [Commanding Officer] said was ‘She doesn’t like you. It is what it is. If you don’t like it, you can leave,’” she recalled.
The 22-year vet said the dismissal from the detail left her fuming, and railed against McCray’s character and boondoggle mental health initiative ThriveNYC.
“Chirlane was a fraud to her core…. I was angry for months at myself and at the other New Yorkers who put Bill and Chirlane in office, because I felt like the whole city had been tricked.”
But Brownlee, who retired in 2021 as a first-grade detective, recalled a few stories of positive interactions with de Blasio, including the mayor giving her every Christmas off after telling him about her annual party while shopping together for the holiday.
“From then on, I was able to see some humanity in the mayor,” she wrote. “I realized he could be a genuinely caring person, someone I wouldn’t mind going out for wine with when I retired.”
The former mayor didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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