“After seven years of failed leadership, the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent spectacle of police brutality have revealed Mayor de Blasio to be the single greatest obstacle to peace and justice in New York City,” wrote New York city council member Carlos Menchaca in a Medium post published last Thursday.

In his statement, Menchaca, New York state’s first Mexican-American elected official, lambasted the mayor for his fatally bungled response to COVID-19, and even more so for failing to negotiate in good faith with a city council that has called to defund the NYPD and invest in other urgent social needs — not to mention letting the police riot in the street during the recent wave of protests for the Black Lives Matter movement, when cops wantonly brutalized protesters and members of the press.

When de Blasio was running for mayor back in 2013, it didn’t seem like his tenure in office would turn out this way. Even then, seven years before George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, #BlackLivesMatter had already made racist police violence a mainstream issue. De Blasio’s biracial family was featured in more than one campaign ad, for example, in one of them the candidate and his teenage son, Dante, spoke with a sincere affect about the candidate’s commitment to ending the NYPD’s abusive “stop-and-frisk” policy. He ran his campaign as a father who, although white, understood what it is like to raise young people of color who must navigate racist, state-sanctioned violence.