EDITORIAL: Larry, we've read the Fox News interview twice. We understand what you did.

You cleared Mayor Michelle Wu of any responsibility for Sunday's mob attack on your own officer in Dorchester. You said, verbatim, "the blame is not with the mayor. The blame is with the City Council." You credited the mayor with "budgeting for and hiring roughly 100 officers a year during her time in office." And then you turned every ounce of political pressure onto a group of councilors — most of whom, notably, sit on that Council because Mayor Wu helped put them there.

We are going to be direct with you.

Michelle Wu is the elected chief executive of the City of Boston. Commissioner Michael Cox is her appointment. He reports to her office. The department's public tone — including the "safest major city in America" talking point you have publicly mocked on the union's own X account — is set by City Hall, not Beacon Hill and not the Council.

You yourself told Fox News, in the same interview, that Boston Police "did not put any extra bodies out" this weekend and "ran below their own minimum standards." That is not a Council decision. That is a decision the department itself made. The department Wu runs. The department Wu's commissioner runs.

You are describing a failure of executive-branch leadership and then insisting the executive branch bears no blame. It does not add up.

Michelle Wu ran, and won, on the promise of a Boston that would be safe for its residents. Every mayor does. She has continued to sell that message every day since she took office — most visibly through the "safest major city in America" framing your own union publicly rejects.

If a mayor campaigns on public safety and her department fails to keep the peace, the mayor is accountable. That is how executive accountability works. You know that. Every union president knows that.

Boston's City Council is not a free-standing body untouched by the mayor's political operation. Several of its current members owe their seats to Wu's endorsement. Several more align with the mayor's caucus on nearly every roll call. Blaming the Council collectively — while the mayor sits at the top of the same political operation that helped seat many of them — is a partial accounting.

Councilor Ed Flynn has publicly demanded accountability. Councilor Erin Murphy has as well. If the rest of the Council is failing to condemn the Dorchester attack, that failure travels up the same political stack — to the mayor whose coalition it is.

The BPPA and the Wu administration are in the middle of ongoing negotiations over hiring, over overtime, over contract terms, and over department funding for the next fiscal cycle. A union president who publicly attacks a mayor known for personalizing political disputes risks losing budget items and losing leverage. We understand the calculation.

But the calculation is not the same as the truth.

There is a version of this month where the head of the BPPA walks up to a microphone and says: "The mayor picked the commissioner. The commissioner will not speak. That's on the mayor. Fix it."

That version has not arrived.

Larry, MDN has your union's back. We have amplified the message on this attack, on staffing, on Cox's silence, on the "safest city" line, and on the Council's silence. We will keep doing it. But the rank-and-file you represent deserve a union that names the actual boss.

The mayor is not off-limits for criticism. She campaigned on this. She hired the man who won't speak. She is not delivering.

Say it.