#De Blasio installs ‘BLM’ mural in Harlem a day after bailing on Trump Tower event

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Mayor Bill DeBlasio spoke at the Black Lives Matter installation on Adam Clayton Powell Jr .
Dan Herrick

Mayor Bill de Blasio showed up at a Black Lives Matter mural installation in Harlem on Friday, just hours after he bailed on his much-talked-about plans for a similar event in front of President Trump’s Midtown tower.

Hizzoner did not mention his 11th-hour case of cold feet on the mural plans for Trump Tower — for which 16 police officers and several commanders had been paid overtime Wednesday night, NBC-4 New York reported — or the president as he helped to paint the civil rights mantra ‘Black Lives Matter’ onto Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard.

“This was the place where the message of black America was spread all over the country, all over the world. So this is a place where we must have this mural,” he told the small group of community activists.

De Blasio also didn’t let an exploding political controversy over claims he misled the City Council about Police Department budget cuts stop him from again touting his spending plan for the NYPD.

“We don’t need to just police. Policing is not enough. You don’t police your young people, you reach them, you uplift them, you support them,” de Blasio told the uptown gathering.

His office promised that the painting event set for Trump Tower in Midtown would be rescheduled for sometime next week, but declined to provide any additional details.

Meanwhile, the political storm downtown continued to grow after officials quietly disclosed that one of the biggest changes de Blasio promised to make to the NYPD — transferring the $326 million-a-year school safety division to the Department of Education — won’t take effect this year.

That move alone accounted for nearly one-third of the $1 billion in spending that de Blasio promised he would cut or move from the NYPD’s $6 billion a year budget in response to intense pressure from city lawmakers and Black Lives Matters activists.

The push to ‘defund’ the NYPD was a central demand of the protests that erupted in New York City and across the nation in the aftermath of George Floyd violent death at the hands of police in Minneapolis

“We have a commitment from the de Blasio Administration that school safety will be moved out of the NYPD budget this fiscal year, and we will hold the Mayor to his word,” tweeted Speaker Corey Johnson, who was steamed over the switcheroo.

Instead, soon-to-depart Press Secretary Freddi Goldstein argued on Twitter that the $326 million transfer was never supposed to be booked into the 2021 budget and said that it would be included in the non-binding spending guidelines for future years, which have not yet been made public.

“The mayor said on live TV (@InsideCityHall w/ @errollouis) Monday night – a full 24 hours before the City Council voted – that this transition would be multi-year,” Goldstein tweeted.

However, that defense appeared to contradict de Blasio’s own statements from his June 30th press conference announcing the budget deal with the City Council.

“I am confident that this budget does exactly that — $1 billion is shifted away from the NYPD in a variety of manners,” de Blasio said, clearly referencing the city’s 2021 budget.

“We will be canceling the upcoming recruit class that would have started in July,” he added, before referencing the coming transfer: “And we’re going to make sure that patrol strength is consistent by reassignments from administrative duty to patrol duty, by ensuring that the NYPD will make revisions in some of the functions it performs, ceding certain functions to civilian agencies.”

De Blasio was even asked during that press conference about what the transition period for the school safety division from the NYPD to the DOE would entail.

He never once mentioned any delay in transferring its funding.