With New York facing a renewed wave of disruptive protests by left-wing agitators against President Trump’s policies, the city’s police are the ones getting handcuffed. Feature the green-vested pettifoggers who are snooping on New York’s Finest as they try to keep sidewalks clear, traffic flowing, and the public safe amid the frenzied protests that seek, among other aims, to thwart the federal government’s enforcement of immigration laws.

It can hardly serve to bolster the morale of the city’s police that these green-vested monitors come courtesy of New York City’s own watchdog agency, the Department of Investigation. Lay the blame at the feet of state and local Democrats. In the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, these liberal politicians forced a punitive court settlement on New York’s police for having the audacity to refuse to surrender public spaces to the tender mercies of the left.

The rioting at Los Angeles was shrugged off the other day by Vice President Harris as “overwhelmingly peaceful.” No wonder she didn’t get elected president. We need vigilant policing to prevent constitutional demonstrations from getting out of hand. New York’s police in 2020 were hard-pressed to control some of the Black Lives Matter protests that descended into violence, looting, and lawlessness that had no connection to civil rights concerns.

Some 400 New York police officers were “attacked and injured” during the protests, the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, Patrick Hendry, has told us. “Untold amounts” of private property was “destroyed because violent agitators used the protests as cover for mayhem.” Yet far from commending the police, the city instead rushed to succor the protesters, shelling out millions of dollars in settlements to those claiming the NYPD was too tough.  

The city acquiesced, too, to the demands by left-wing groups like the state branch of the American Civil Liberties Union that the police overhaul their procedures to deal with future disturbances. In a court settlement — which the PBA opposed in court, only to be overruled by the Second Circuit — the civil liberties union made clear that the “primary goal” should be “protecting the rights of protesters,” and to “minimize police presence.”  

The civil liberties union stresses that the settlement’s focus is “protecting the rights of protesters.” In future protests, it adds, the settlement would “minimize police presence” and “require NYPD to use de-escalation methods.” After the circuit court turned down the PBA, Mr. Hendry lamented that this would have dangerous consequences “the next time a mass protest spirals into violence and police officers are being assaulted with bricks and bottles.”

Particularly galling, as Mr. Hendry explained it, was that the city had defended the settlement policy in court by arguing that “officer safety shouldn’t be considered.” This ignored, he added, “the very real dangers we face when policing these demonstrations.” It left the city’s officers “abandoned and needlessly endangered by their leadership.” The public is put at risk, too, when rioters get free rein to, say, close streets, or bridges.

These columns last year decried the anti-Israel protesters who shut down highways and other arteries of commerce in their zeal to oppose the Jewish state’s fight for survival against Hamas. That chaos was reminiscent of some of the worst excesses of the Floyd protests that convulsed many cities, “recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s,” as Senator Cotton put it in a Times op-ed. New York “suffered the worst” of that disorder, he added.

Yet Mayor de Blasio “stood by while Midtown Manhattan descended into lawlessness,” Mr. Cotton wrote. Today, Mayor Adams is trying to hold the line on the disorder, even as the city’s police are constrained by the post-Floyd settlement. Saturday’s “No Kings” protests against Mr. Trump’s presidency could prove a test of whether the city can preserve order and public safety or whether the green-vested minions will force police to yield to mere anarchy.