The FBI raided headquarters of a New York City Police Department union for police sergeants on Tuesday after what Mayor Bill de Blasio called “some very destructive actions” from the union, according to PIX 11 News. De Blasio refused to comment on the FBI investigation but called union president Ed Mullins “divisive.” “I don’t know the specifics, and I don’t know who it’s directed at,” the mayor said of the FBI probe.

Investigators are also searching union president Ed Mullins’ Long Island home after securing a search warrant, The New York Times reported, citing two unnamed sources with knowledge of the investigation. The probe is a joint effort between the FBI and the public corruption unit of the U.S. attorney’s Manhattan office. An FBI spokesman confirmed with the Times only that agents “were conducting a law enforcement operation pursuant to an ongoing investigation” at the sergeant union’s offices in Lower Manhattan.  

“At least four federal agents were inside the union’s headquarters at around noon on Tuesday,” New York Times journalists William Rashbaum and Michael Gold wrote. “The investigators lowered dark wooden blinds and placed pieces of cardboard inside four windows to prevent the public from gazing inside.” A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment when New York Daily News initially reported the raid.

The Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA), which represents about 13,000 current and retired sergeants and is one of the largest police unions in the country, hasn’t issued a statement about the raid, and neither has Mullins, who just a day earlier was criticizing de Blasio, per usual. This time, it was regarding the mayor’s plan to hire the private security firm Global Guardian Security to man the perimeter of Rikers Island to free up corrections staff at the facility Sen. Jabari Brisport deemed “inhumane” and “torturous” on a tour. 

“Our goal is to see if there’s a way to relieve some of the pressure on the DOC officers and some of the issues they are having so they can focus on the big problems and not be tied to some of the lower tasks,” Global Guardian President Dale Buckner told New York Daily News. “I would equate it to why contractors are used in war zones. You don’t want warfighters doing menial tasks. If we can give back real capacity to the department, that’s interesting to us.”

Mullins deemed the use of a private firm “union-busting at its most basic core.” “Mayor de Blasio and his cohorts are no friends of union labor and will do anything in their power to diminish and dismantle us,” Mullins wrote to the union he represents. “Their actions, as well as their inactions, have already forced corrections officers to work in incredibly dangerous and filthy environments.”

Interestingly enough, he didn’t mention the predominantly Black and brown inmates who have to live in those same “dangerous and filthy environments,” and Mullins seldom mentions anyone Black or brown at all on social media, except to degrade them or use them politically. Rep. Ritchie Torres, one of the first openly gay Black men elected to Congress, tweeted about the union leader being a subject of FBI interest: “Ed Mullins, who famously called me a ‘first-class whore’ for daring to ask questions about the @SBANYPD, just got a first-class raid from the FBI.” 

Scott Hechinger, a Brooklyn public defender, called Mullins an “overt racist, who regularly promotes violence & hatred” through the SBA Twitter Account.” Mullins faced department discipline charges over his social media conduct, including his decision to share a police report of the arrest of de Blasio’s daughter, Chiara, during a demonstration, The New York Times reported.

Hechinger listed examples of Mullins criticizing NYPD leaders in a Twitter thread.

In one tweet Hechinger included, the attorney accused Mullins of targeting a city leader after speaking out against a sergeant who used two “close-range shots” to kill a 66-year-old Black woman with a mental illness. The SBA tweeted that the sergeant was “doing his job.” The SBA used photos of homeless people sleeping on a subway train to condemn the mayor in another tweet. And in Hechinger’s final tweet, he included a picture of Mullins meeting with former President Donald Trump “talking about ‘the plight of police officers in NYC.”

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