#‘Opportunist’ Corey Johnson turns on cops after long history as ally

City Council Speaker Corey Johnson’s plan to slash a billion dollars from the NYPD budget — after he voted to expand the force in 2015 — has left a key law-enforcement ally feeling hurt and betrayed.

“He’s an opportunist is what I would call him. He’s jumping on the bandwagon,” fumed Paul DiGiacomo, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, to The Post, saying he felt Johnson was motivated by his mayoral ambitions rather than sound public policy.

“Corey Johnson enjoys the expertise of New York City police detectives that are his security for him and his family and keep him safe,” DiGiacomo added, referring to Johnson’s eight-cop security detail. “If we’re so bad, why do you need us? Walk around by yourself.”

The union boss said he and Johnson previously enjoyed warm relations.

“We’ve spoken over the years on many issues,” said DiGiacomo. “We feel abandoned by every elected official to be honest.”

Before his about-face on policing this month, Johnson spent years boasting of his pro-police bonafides.

Between 2008 and 2010, when Johnson worked as director of government relations and community affairs for the real estate firm GFI Development, he regularly partnered with New York’s Finest.

“I did community outreach and relations with the NYPD to get drug dealers and peddlers off the streets,” he told the New York Times during his first campaign in 2013.

In a questionnaire for the Urban Justice Center in that same city council race, Johnson said preventing reductions in fire and police protection would be among his top three budget priorities.

Johnson yukked it up with officers in February 2015 when he attended his local precinct’s Cop of the Month Awards, a few months before his vote to expand the police force by nearly 1,300 new uniformed cops.

When he ran for re-election in 2017, he won the endorsement of the city’s Police Benevolent Association.

In the last month, however, Johnson has used his Twitter feed to repeatedly condemn police violence.

“Racism and police brutality are public health emergencies,” he said in one post. In another he called out officers’ “unnerving violence” in response to Black Lives Matter protesters. Johnson has demanded an independent investigation of “the NYPD mishandling of these protests.”

But in 2018, he had a much different view.

Back then he showered the NYPD with praise. When The Post published video in 2018 of a man heckling several NYPD officers in Brooklyn, Johnson unleashed.

“I want everyone in the NYPD to know that the vast, vast majority of New Yorkers have the utmost respect and pride in the department. You put your lives on the line every day, and I think I speak for most New Yorkers when I say I am incredibly grateful for your heroism and sacrifice,” Johnson tweeted.

As recently as March, CoJo was urging New Yorkers to thank cops for continuing to work during the city’s COVID-19 crisis.

Posts like this have fallen off markedly in recent weeks.

A review of Johnson’s social media from earlier years does reveal a more nuanced picture, with posts calling out individual officers and instances of police misconduct, including the fatal takedown of Eric Garner by officer Daniel Pantaleo — whose termination Johnson repeatedly demanded.

“This is a distortion of what the Speaker has always stood for,” Johnson’s office said in a statement.

“He has always had tremendous respect for the women and men of the NYPD who risk their lives for New Yorkers. But he has also always spoken out about the need for police accountability and criminal justice reform.”