There weren’t enough chairs, so Jazmine Headley sat on the floor. Rather than get an apology from the security people at the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program office in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, for treating her and her 1-year-old son so poorly for being poor, Headley was treated to a lesson in compliance when they called in the NYPD to teach her a lesson.

The New York Times takes progressive NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio to task for being too de Blasio.

“The most sacred duty of government is to protect people,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said, “especially defenseless children. There is nothing more barbaric than separating children from their parents. There is no excuse for this horror and certainly no reason.”

Strong words, except they were twitted in response to Trump, to ICE. To the NYPD, BdB was slightly less forceful.

It was only several hours later that he tweeted about the video, calling it “a disturbing incident.”

“Like anyone who’s watched this video, I have a lot of questions about how this was handled,” he wrote, adding that the city agencies involved would “get to the bottom” of what happened.

Amazing how much easier it is to scream about the awfulness of the other guy while having “a lot of questions” when the video is about your people doing the same, if not worse, on your watch.

In the meantime, Headley remains in custody at Rikers Island.

Ms. Headley was charged with resisting arrest, acting in a manner injurious to a child, obstructing governmental administration and trespassing. The police said she refused medical treatment for herself and her son, who was placed in the care of a relative.

In the exercise of discretion, Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez, another progressive reformer, could have declined prosecution and released her. But he didn’t. Was it not enough that the police, notable for the identitarians in the crowd not to be white male supremacists, could have maimed her son?

But the question remains why the cops were there in the first place.

The department is investigating the incident with the city Human Resources Administration, which administers public benefits. A spokeswoman for Allied Universal, the parent company of the security firm visible on security guards’ patches, FJC Security, did not respond to requests for comment.

“They’re always rude,” Ms. Ferguson said about the guards in an interview. “They think that people that are poor don’t have nothing, so you can treat them any kind of way.”

Maybe the problem isn’t racism or sexism, but that people are often needlessly cruel to other people, and when given a little bit of power, they can’t help but abuse it. Even when it means harming a child.

Update: Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez has tossed the prosecution. It would have been better to do so at arraignment, but better late than never.