纽约——八年前，比尔·白思豪入主纽约市长办公室，承诺对这个美国最大的城市进行自由主义改造，消除严重的不平等，改革警察的做法。
他取得了一些成功，兑现了提供普及学前教育的承诺，并遏制了警方的拦截搜身策略。但是，德·白思豪两届任期的遗产也是由他与警察和推动他上台的警察改革活动人士的紧张关系、与前州长的公开不和以及以歪曲头条新闻的方式纪念的失态形成的。
在任期的最后几天，德·白思豪正在考虑竞选更高的职位，他打赌他早期的成就和他带领这座拥有880万人口的城市穿越疫情的经历，将比那些小插曲和冲突更能打动纽约人，将实质和风格分开。
“我希望人们记住，我们需要消除不平等，我们做到了。这是可以做到的，”白思豪周二在接受美联社采访时表示。“我们能够以非常切实、真实的方式做到这一点。我认为这为未来的发展打开了大门，但这是可以做到的。”
市长还承认他与媒体的关系紧张，并在这一过程中犯了错误，他说，随着他在市长办公室的时间逐渐减少，他最近一直在反思这一点。
“我想我本可以沟通得更好。我想我本可以更好地理解媒体需要对他们的工作做些什么。“随着时间的推移，我试图做出调整。这是我作为一名公共服务人员将继续努力的事情。”
1月1日，他正式将权力移交给当选市长、民主党人、前警察队长埃里克·亚当斯。
白思豪的支持者，甚至一些批评者认为，除非他给纽约人一些怀念他的空间，否则他的成就不会得到赞赏。
德·白思豪的支持者、多位前市长的顾问希德·大卫多夫说:“我认为他做了一些会延续几代人的事情，这些事情非常重要，只有在他离开聚光灯、离开办公室几年后才会得到赞赏。
就连白思豪自己也认为他的遗产需要一段时间才能巩固。“我们做的很多事情不仅仅是为了今天。是为了明天，”他说。
———
胜利、遗憾和人造PAUS
以绝对优势获胜后选举2013年，德·白思豪成为20年来第一位担任纽约市长的民主党人，纽约是一个高度民主的大都市，可以作为自由政策的实验室，比如他推动实现的每小时15美元的最低工资。
他的到来标志着与迈克尔·彭博时代的不同——这位亿万富翁前市长最初是共和党人，后来成为独立人士——他吹嘘这座城市是奢侈品，并为停车搜身辩护。
德·白思豪的进步议程和民粹主义信息有时会被小报喜欢的错误所掩盖，比如在他第一个任期的几天里，他用刀叉吃了一片披萨，这是一次烹饪上的失礼。
其他值得注意的失误包括在飞机失事遇难者的追悼会上迟到，以及在土拨鼠日庆祝活动中丢下一只土拨鼠。土拨鼠一周后死亡。
这位市长表示，他对纽约市媒体的强硬态度并不感到惊讶，小报标题也“丰富多彩”，比如《纽约邮报》最近的一期封面，他在标题“圣诞老人”下被修改成戴着菲德尔·卡斯特罗帽子的圣诞老人
他说:“我对围绕一些事情的密集报道感到惊讶，我认为这些事情在计划中并不重要，但却占据了大量时间和精力。
白思豪在第一年就取得了胜利，他将公立幼儿园扩大到了城市中的每一个4岁儿童。他以此为基础，将该项目扩大到更多的3岁儿童，并计划在2023年秋季普及。
———
与警方的紧张关系
他和该市的警察关系不好。德·白思豪开始担任市长时，承诺彻底改革该部门与公众的互动，并减少了该部门在街上大部分黑人和西班牙裔人聚集时的拦截、询问和搜身策略。
他对2014年夏天警方杀害埃里克·加纳事件的处理激怒了警察和许多致力于选举白思豪的警察改革倡导者。
他批评了这些官员，但在漫长的联邦民权调查结束之前，基本上没有对任何部门进行处罚。那年晚些时候，当一名对警方杀害未透露姓名的黑人男子感到愤怒的不安枪手开枪打死两名NYPD警察时，该市最大的警察工会负责人说，市长“手上有血”，当市长在警察葬礼上发言时，官员们拒绝了他。
长度政治战略家和布鲁克林全美有色人种协进会的主席乔伊·威廉姆斯说，白思豪似乎把与NYPD的对抗视为“一场政治危机，而不是一场人类危机”
威廉姆斯说，这令人失望，推动警察改革的团体联盟帮助选举了白思豪，预计他会对警察和工会更加强硬。
“我们从他那里预料到了这一点，因为他说他要这么做。他没有这么做，”她说。
德·白思豪承认与一些警察工会领导人和一些警察改革活动人士关系紧张，他说，他不同意他们所有人的观点，并认为主流纽约人希望在中间有所作为。
——下一步是什么(什么不是)
不仅仅是城市的那些角落对市长感到不安。一些纽约人质疑白思豪在2019年竞选总统时对工作的专注。他告诉美联社，虽然这段经历“很难”也“不太可能”，但它让他意识到他需要更好地与人交流。
他说他的总统野心已经过去了。“我的舞蹈卡上没有，”他打趣道。
白思豪承认，他一直在努力解决无家可归等棘手问题。
尽管收容所里无家可归的家庭数量有所下降，而且他的政府实现了建造或保留20万套经济适用房的目标，但在他的两届任期内，收容所里的单身成年人数量还是增加了。
他的最后一年一直被该市里克斯岛监狱的缓慢关闭所困扰，该监狱一直受到严重的人员短缺、囚犯死亡和疫情暴力事件的困扰。今年该市监狱系统有16人死亡，是2013年以来最多的。
当纽约市成为疫情的中心时，白思豪试图控制这种反应的行为经常被定义为与当时的州长安德鲁·科莫的持续公开争斗，后者通过严厉打击白思豪的就地避难令和学校关闭计划，加剧了他们之间酝酿已久的紧张关系。
当科莫在8月份因被指控性骚扰至少11名女性而辞职时，德布拉西奥在他所在的城市的回应中有更大的自由度。他推出了一系列激进的命令，要求每一名公职人员接种疫苗。这些命令在很大程度上经受住了法律挑战，并推高了不愿接种疫苗的警官、消防员和其他城市工作人员的接种率，促使德·白思豪将授权扩大到私营部门工作人员，这是美国所有州或大城市中最全面的疫苗授权。
像科莫一样，德·白思豪在疫情期间几乎每天都有电视简报会，但最近几个月，简报会带有综艺的味道，德·白思豪在解释排名选择投票和与放克音乐传奇人物乔治·克林顿一起演唱时，谴责披萨上的菠萝配料。
到目前为止，当被问及是否会竞选州长时，白思豪对自己的未来计划保持缄默。同样模糊的是民主党通往州长官邸的道路。州长凯西·霍楚尔(Kathy Hochul)一直在积累竞选资金和民主党的支持，从州北部的官员到白思豪所在的布鲁克林区的领导人，这让他不得不拼凑出一个不明确的选区。
“我想我已经在路上放了很多面包屑，”他说。“我打算继续从事公共服务。至于选举政治，我将很快提供最新情况。”
A look at de Blasio's NYC mayoral tenure and what's next
NEW YORK -- Bill de Blasio swept into the New York City mayor’s office eight years ago promising a liberal remolding of the nation’s largest city that would level deep inequities and reform police practices.
He had some successes, delivering on a promise to offer universal pre-kindergarten and curbing the police stop-and-frisk tactic. But the legacy of de Blasio’s two terms has also been shaped by strained relationships with both police and the police-reform activists who propelled him to office, public discord with the former governor and gaffes memorialized in skewering headlines.
As he closes out the final days of his term, de Blasio is contemplating a run for higher office, a bet that his early achievements and his steering the city of 8.8 million through the pandemic will stick with New Yorkers more than the flubs and conflicts, separating the substance from style.
“I want people to remember that we needed to fight inequality and we did. And it can be done," de Blasio said in an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press. “We were able to do that in very tangible, real ways. I think that opens the door for a lot more going forward, but it can be done.”
The mayor also acknowledged he had a strained relationship with the media, and made errors along the way, something he said he’s been reflecting on a lot lately as he wound down his time in the mayor's office.
"I think I could have communicated better. I think I could have understood better what the media needed to do to their jobs,” de Blasio said. "I tried to make adjustments over time. And it’s something I’m going to keep working on as a public service.”
He officially turns over the reins to Mayor-elect Eric Adams, a Democrat and former police captain, on Jan. 1.
De Blasio’s supporters and even some critics suggest his achievements will not be appreciated until he gives New Yorkers some space to miss him.
“I think he’s done some things that will last for generations and are so important and won’t be appreciated until he’s out of the limelight, out of the office, for a few years," said Sid Davidoff, a de Blasio supporter and advisor to several former mayors.
Even de Blasio himself thinks his legacy will take a while to solidify. “A lot of what we were doing was not just for today. It was for tomorrow," he said.
———
WINS, REGRETS AND FAUX PAUS
After winning a landslideelectionin 2013, de Blasio became the first Democrat in two decades to serve as mayor of New York, a heavily Democratic metropolis that could serve as a laboratory for liberal policies, such as the $15 an hour minimum wage that he pushed to achieve.
His arrival marked a departure from the years of Michael Bloomberg — the billionaire former mayor who started as a Republican and ended as an independent — who boasted of the city as a luxury product and defended stop-and-frisk.
De Blasio’s progressive agenda and populist message were at times overshadowed by tabloid-delighting blunders, such as a culinary faux pas days into his first term, when he ate a slice of pizza with a knife and fork.
Other notable fumbles included showing up late to a memorial for plane crash victims and dropping a groundhog during a Groundhog Day celebration. The groundhog died a week later.
The mayor said he was not surprised New York City media was tough and that the tabloid headlines were “colorful," such as a recent New York Post cover in which he was photoshopped to appear as a Santa Claus wearing a Fidel Castro hat under the headline, “Santanista Claus."
“I was surprised at sort of the intense coverage around some things I thought were small in the scheme of things but took up a lot of time and energy,” he said.
De Blasio notched a victory in his first year by expanding public prekindergarten to every 4-year-old in the city. He built on that, expanding the program to more 3-year-olds with a plan to make it universal by fall of 2023.
———
TENSIONS WITH POLICE
He’s had a difficult relationship with the city’s police force. De Blasio started his mayoralty pledging to overhaul the department’s interactions with the public and curtailed the department’s tactic of stopping, questioning and frisking mostly Black and Hispanic people on the street en masse.
His handling of the summer 2014 police killing of Eric Garner angered officers and many of the police reform advocates who worked to elect de Blasio.
He spoke critically of the officers but largely held off any department punishments until a lengthy federal civil rights investigation concluded. Later that year, when a disturbed gunman angry about police killings of unnamed Black men fatally shot two NYPD officers, the head of the city’s largest police union said the mayor had “blood on his hands” and officers turned their backs on the mayor as he spoke at police funerals.
L. Joy Williams, a political strategist and president of the Brooklyn NAACP, said de Blasio seemed to approach the confrontation with the NYPD “as a political crisis, rather than as a humanity crisis.”
Williams said that was disappointing and the coalition of groups pushing for police reform who helped elected de Blasio expected him to be tougher against the officers and the union.
“We expected that from him, because that’s what he said he was going to do. And he didn’t do it,” she said.
De Blasio acknowledged the tension with some police union leaders and some police reform activists, saying he doesn't agree with all of them and thinks mainstream New Yorkers wanted something in the middle.
——— WHAT'S NEXT (AND WHAT'S NOT)
It wasn't just those corners of the city that had their qualms with the mayor. Some New Yorkers questioned de Blasio's focus on the job when he launched a muddling bid for president in 2019. He told The AP that while the experience was “difficult" and “unlikely,” it made him realize he needed to communicate with people better.
He said his presidential ambitions are in the past. “Not on my dance card," he quipped.
De Blasio admits he struggled to address intractable issues such as homelessness.
The population of single adults in shelters rose during his two terms despite a drop in the number of homeless families in shelters and his administration meeting a goal of building or preserving 200,000 affordable housing units.
His last year has been dogged with the slow closing the city’s Rikers Island jail, which has been plagued by severe staffing shortages, prisoner deaths and violence amid the pandemic. There have been 16 deaths this year in the city’s jail system, the most since 2013.
When New York City became the epicenter of the pandemic, de Blasio’s attempts to manage the response were frequently defined by the ongoing public feuding with then Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who fueled their long-simmering tense relationship by swatting down de Blasio’s plans for a shelter-in-place order and school closures.
When Cuomo resigned in August amid allegations he sexually harassed at least 11 women, de Blasio had wider latitude in his city’s response. He rolled out a series of aggressive mandates, requiring every public employee to get vaccinated. The orders largely survived legal challenges and drove up vaccination rates of reluctant police officers, firefighters and other city workers, prompting de Blasio to extend the mandates to private-sector workers, the most sweeping vaccine mandate of any state or big city in the U.S.
Like Cuomo, de Blasio had his own near-daily televised briefings during the pandemic, but they took a variety-show flavor in recent months, with de Blasio decrying pineapple toppings on pizza as he explained ranked-choice voting and singing with funk music legend George Clinton.
So far, de Blasio has remained coy on his future plans when asked if he's going to run for governor. Equally vague is the Democrat’s path to the governor’s mansion. Gov. Kathy Hochul has been amassing campaign funds and Democratic endorsements, from upstate officials to leaders in the heart of de Blasio’s Brooklyn, leaving him to stitch together an unclear constituency.
“I think I’ve put plenty of breadcrumbs out there on the trail," he said. “I’m going to stay in public service. As to electoral politics, I’ll give an update very, very soon."
