Two law enforcement officials said a former New York City police union president who has clashed with city officials over his insulting tweets and combative behavior is expected to surrender Wednesday to face criminal charges related to a raid last year on his home and union office.
Ed Mullins resigned as president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association in October after the FBI raided the union’s Manhattan headquarters and his Long Island home. He left the NYPD in November, a month after being placed on modified duty and forced to surrender his gun and badge due to the raids.
The charges against Mullins were not immediately available. He is scheduled to appear in federal court later today. Officials who confirmed his arrest were not authorized to speak publicly about an investigation and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Messages seeking comment were left with the NYPD, the union, and a lawyer who has previously represented Mullins.
The Sergeants Benevolent Association represents approximately 13,000 active and retired New York City Police Department sergeants and manages a $264 million retirement fund.
Mullins, a police sergeant assigned to full-time union work, was subject to department disciplinary proceedings for tweeting disparaging remarks about two city officials and tweeting NYPD paperwork about the arrest of then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s daughter during protests over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in 2020. Mullins was forced to forego 70 vacation days as punishment, which amounted to nearly $32,000 in pay. According to police records, he previously forfeited 25 vacation days in 1987 for an off-duty incident in which he punched one person and threw a bottle at another.
Mullins, a police officer since 1982, was promoted to sergeant, a rank higher than detective but lower than captain and lieutenant, in 1993 and was elected president of the sergeants union in 2002.
Under Mullins’ leadership, the union has fought for better pay, with contracts resulting in 40 percent pay increases, and has taken a prominent role in the anti-reform movement. Though he was a full-time union chief, city law allowed Mullins to retain his sergeant’s position and collect salaries from both the union and the police department. According to public records, Mullins earned more than $220,000 in 2020 between the two jobs: $88,757 from the union and $133,195 from the NYPD.
Along with Mullins’ regular appearances on cable news networks like Fox News and Newsmax — including one in which he was photographed in front of a QAnon mug — the union’s most powerful megaphone is its 45,000-follower Twitter account, which Mullins runs himself, often with venom.
During a rash of incidents in which police officers were doused with water in 2018, Mullins suggested that then-Commissioner James O’Neill and Chief of Department Terence Monahan “consider another profession” and tweeted that “O’KNEEL must go!”
Mullins, O’Neill retorted, was “a bit of a keyboard gangster” who rarely showed up to department functions.
Mullins was chastised by the police department after tweeting in 2020 that he called the city’s former Health Commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, a “b——” and U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres a “first-class whore.”
Mullins was enraged by reports that Barbot refused to provide police with face masks in the early days of the pandemic, and he was enraged by Torres’ calls for an investigation into a potential police work slowdown in September 2020.
Torres, a gay man, called Mullins’ tweet homophobic.
