Other elected officials have vehemently condemned the way the woman, Jazmine Headley, was treated, but de Blasio only made two brief comments about it on Twitter.
On Wednesday, the mayor broke his silence to apologize to Headley, to criticize how she was treated and to defend his response to it.
“I want to apologize to her on behalf of all 8.6 million New Yorkers,” de Blasio said during his weekly news conference Wednesday, at a public housing complex in Brooklyn.
He added: “What happened to Jazmine Headley and her son Damone should never have happened, should never happen to anybody.”
He said that he first learned of the incident Sunday evening and then inquired about it to officials at the Police Department and the Human Resources Administration.
“I reached out to the commissioners involved for an update on what had happened and why,” de Blasio said. “They both told me they were getting facts immediately. Until I got their side of what happened, I could not speak to the public. Once I had it, I did.”
He added, “What I say has to be definitive.”
By Tuesday morning, prosecutors had dropped the charges against Headley — which included resisting arrest, acting in a manner injurious to a child, obstructing governmental administration and trespassing. She was finally released from Rikers Island on Tuesday evening after a State Supreme Court judge in Brooklyn ruled that she would not be transferred to New Jersey to face an unrelated credit card fraud charge, for which she had an outstanding warrant.
Headley appeared in court in New Jersey on Wednesday. Brian Neary, her lawyer, said that she was accepted into a pretrial intervention program that would require her to do 20 hours of community service and report periodically to the authorities in order to have the charges dismissed.
The incident occurred Friday while Headley and her son, Damone Buckman III, were waiting at a social services center in Brooklyn. A bystander took cellphone video of it, which they then posted on Facebook that same day. The video quickly drew attention online and sparked widespread outrage. By Sunday, it received extensive media coverage.
Headley, 23, had gone to the benefits center to inquire about receiving child care vouchers. She had waited for hours and was sitting on the floor when she apparently got into a dispute with a security guard.
That video, and a second video posted online, shows several people in uniform grappling with Headley, who is on the floor, and attempting to prevent the officers from taking Damone from her arms. The incident involved police officers and uniformed peace officers employed by the Human Resources Administration.
De Blasio first addressed the incident Monday afternoon, when he posted a message on Twitter, calling it disturbing and saying that the police department and the Human Resources Administration would “get to the bottom of what happened.”
On Tuesday, he posted another Twitter message, praising the Brooklyn district attorney’s office for its decision to drop the charges.
But while the mayor stuck to Twitter, other elected officials spoke out publicly. On Tuesday, the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, appeared to refer indirectly to the mayor when he said during a rally in support of Headley on the City Hall steps that “every leader in this city” had an obligation to speak out about the incident and to call for her release from Rikers Island.
De Blasio, who has showed himself loathe in the past to criticize the police, was quick to blame the peace officers, although he said that a review of the incident had not yet been completed and it was not clear what each of the officers had done.
“It’s unbelievable to me that people who have the title ‘peace officer’ would do this to a woman and her baby,” he said. “I believe that by the time the NYPD arrived, the situation was already out of hand and should not have been.”
Two peace officers have been placed on modified duty.
De Blasio has often refused to apologize for mistakes made by city agencies. But Wednesday, he tried to empathize with Headley. He used words such as “outraged” and phrases like “disgusted as a parent,” to describe his feelings.
“I’ve been in those benefit centers. I’ve talked to a lot of people in need in this city,” the mayor said. “Whatever was happening, there was no reason to get physical. She was not presenting a danger.”
The news conference centered on the mayor’s plan to shore up the city’s crumbling public housing system, which houses 400,000 low-income New Yorkers and faces a daunting $32 billion in unmet capital needs.
The plan, details of which The New York Times reported last month, aims to finance repairs to apartments by selling unused air rights and allowing private developers to construct residential buildings on underutilized land, like parking lots. It would also seek to include more than a third of public housing stock in a federal program that would hand over day-to-day management to private partners, while maintaining the affordability of those apartments.
The de Blasio administration also struck a deal with the New York City Housing Authority’s biggest union, which would allow caretakers and supervisors to work longer hours and weekends in order to make apartment repairs when residents are typically home.
The agency also expects to replace 297 of its lowest-performing boilers by 2026 and replace 405 elevators at 30 developments, where 58,000 residents live. NYCHA will also take measures to cut the rat population at its developments by half by the end of 2020.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.