“Combative” and “firebrand” were the descriptions of Pat Lynch after the longtime Police Benevolent Association president announced that he would not seek a seventh four-year term in June.

They were accurate but didn’t paint a full picture of Lynch’s 24 years heading the city’s largest police union.

One of his notable, if quieter, achievements has been to change the culture of a union that too often, over the decade before he took office, had veered into outlaw territory.

The PBA gained its greatest notoriety during the last half of the 15-year reign of Phil Caruso for the 1992 rally outside City Hall, against the creation of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, that degenerated into a mini-riot.

The complete breakdown of discipline among hundreds of the officers there who first tried to storm City Hall and then harassed motorists and pedestrians near the Brooklyn Bridge didn’t surprise those who witnessed cops drinking beer that morning while others carried racist signs denouncing then-Mayor David Dinkins.

Lynch was a young officer then, but the embarrassment the rowdy cops caused the NYPD and their union clearly made an impression. Not long after his election as PBA president in June 1999, he organized the first mass rally since that debacle to protest the deluge of police criticism following the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man mistaken for a rapist by four Street Crime Unit officers, that February. The venue this time was Battery Park; more memorable than the speeches there was that cops bringing their own beverages carried water bottles.

Under Lynch, the union practice of covering up egregious conduct by cops that caused death or serious injury virtually ceased. In late 1994, a year before Caruso stepped down, the death of a Bronx man, Anthony Baez, after being placed in a department-barred chokehold by a PBA delegate, Francis Livoti, triggered three meetings by officers who responded to the scene — one at union headquarters — to synchronize their stories.

In 1997, after Abner Louima was sodomized in a bathroom at the 70th Precinct in Brooklyn by Officer Justin Volpe for allegedly punching him, union officials held a meeting at the stationhouse to try to conceal what had occurred, and circulated the claim that the grievous wounds suffered by Louima were the product of rough sex. That tale fell apart when Daily News columnist Mike McAlary was tipped off to what happened and secured a hospital bedside interview with Louima.

Lynch, who at the time was a community affairs officer in Brooklyn, without actually saying so, understood that such cover-ups created a terrible image for a law-enforcement union. He vigorously defended cops who were accused of wrongdoing, especially in the 2014 death of Eric Garner, without flouting the law to aid their cases.

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Some critics bristled at his describing accused cop-killers and those long ago convicted of such murders who came up for parole as “mutts” and “skels.” But while Lynch may have intended such words to impress upon the public the severity of their crimes, he was speaking more to his rank and file, who often seemed to feel he was the only public official who valued them in times of trouble.

It was that sense of being under siege that led to arguably Lynch’s most-controversial action as PBA leader: giving the first presidential endorsement in his union’s history to Donald Trump in 2020.

At the time, the defund-the-police movement had gained momentum in city government, and Mayor Bill de Blasio had just signed into law a bill that subjected cops to criminal charges if, in arresting a suspect, they compressed his diaphragm while trying to get him under control. Both Lynch and top NYPD officials vehemently opposed the measure, saying it made it more difficult for cops to do their jobs.

One veteran jail-union leader said then that in this climate, it was understandable that Lynch didn’t care what other New Yorkers thought of Trump, who was popular with city cops. But, he added, giving the nod to a president who had already demonstrated his contempt for the rule of law was akin to a battered wife turning to a seductive scoundrel for comfort.

In the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Lynch issued a statement castigating the rioters who assaulted officers there, but never mentioned Trump’s name.

The ugly incident underscored his mistake in backing the soiled president. But Lynch’s embrace of Trump was a small blemish on a strong record as someone who spoke for his troops but tried to avoid the us-vs.-them trap that cops and their leaders were prone to fall into.

Steier is the former editor of the civil-service newspaper The Chief.

Richard Steier

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