The Jets recently reached out to pro-police organization Blue Lives Matter about a potential partnership. The group told Gang Green to get lost.
“Although I’d love to work with an NFL team right now I feel it is not the right time,” Blue Lives Matter founder Joe Imperatrice told Jets executive Anthony Bulak in email messages “shared with” the New York Post. “All over the United States players feel entitled to disrespect our first responders, our military members both past and present and our flag. These players make more money in a season than some people make in a lifetime and their ‘issues’ are made up, exaggerated, and more times than not false.”
Bulak, the team’s Senior Manager of Premium Partnerships, reached out to Blue Lives Matter about a partnership -- one which surely would have entailed BLM paying the Jets for some sort of formal relationship. In responding, Imperatrice suggested that the group’s money “could better be spent on the families of officers killed in the line of duty protecting the ignorance of these individuals rather than contributing to their paycheck.”
Bulak replied by pointing out that no Jets player has taken a knee during the national anthem. While that’s accurate, it wasn’t persuasive. Imperatrice noted that the team has given employment to running back Isaiah Crowell, who posted on Instagram while with the Browns an image of a police officer’s throat being slashed. Apparently not mentioned by Imperatrice was the reality that Jets acting owner Christopher Johnson has said that he won’t fine players who choose to protest during the anthem, under a since-suspended NFL policy allowing teams to do so.
Here’s the broader point in all of this: The Jets apparently lack the degree of institutional self-awareness necessary to realize that not only were they wasting their time by soliciting BLM but they also were creating a trail of electronic communication that inevitably would be handed to the media.
