Posted By richards on January 16, 2015
Shannon Stapleton/Reuters Law enforcement officers turning their backs on a live screen of Mayor Bill de Blasio as he delivered a eulogy for NYPD Officer Rafael Ramos inside Christ Tabernacle Church, Glendale, Queens, December 27, 2014
The killing of two New York City police officers on December 20, 2014, while they sat in their patrol car near a public housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, has riven the city in a primal way that we have not seen since the Crown Heights race riots that pitted blacks against Hasidic Jews in 1991.
The murdered officers, chosen at random, were Rafael Ramos, a religiously devout Hispanic, and Wenjian Liu, the son of Chinese immigrants whose father works as a presser in a laundry sweatshop. The murderer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, a twenty-eight-year-old black man with no known political affiliations, had shot his girlfriend in Baltimore, traveled to New York intent on killing cops, and then finished himself off with the same gun on a nearby subway platform. On the social-media site Instagram, Brinsley had made remarks about avenging the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown at the hands of police. These postings, along with his boast of Watch what Im going to do to a stranger on the street shortly before he approached the patrol car, suggest the kind of lone-wolf grandiosity and social resentment that we have seen in any number of assassins in public schools and malls.
Almost immediately after the event, it began to seem that a third casualty might be the national protest movement focused on policing and racial injustice that had assumed, in recent weeks, the moral force of a fundamental civil rights issue, attracting widespread political and popular support.
With staggering, but predictable, alacrity, some pro-police figures put forth an argument that they believed inescapably linked the protest movements to the murders. Protesters had called for the death of cops, went the argument, and the call had been answered.* Did it also follow that racial slurs against blacks led to the killing of unarmed black men? And were the lives of cops worth more than those of Eric Garner and other men of color? This was the abyss into which a serious debate about the need to reform the countrys criminal justice system had fallen.
Rudy Giuliani pointed the finger at President Obama:
Pat Lynch, the president of the Patrolmens Benevolent Association (PBA), which represents the 23,000 New York City officers below the rank of sergeant, went after Mayor Bill de Blasio. He said:
Some of this was theater, a political game. Lynch had been attacking de Blasio for months; the PBA is in the midst of contract negotiations with the city and his message to the mayor, in part, may have been: If you want me off your back, give us the contract were demanding.
But there seemed to be more to it. Many cops are worried that, in the age of cell phones, mounted surveillance cameras, and now body cameras pinned to their uniforms, they are vulnerable to legal action for doing what they have always doneand have been taught to doon the job. From their point of view, protesters and liberal officials were on a mission to turn the enforcers of order into potential criminals; rank-and-file patrolmen would be the ones to get sacked, publicly shamed, and even go to jail. In this sense, another message Lynch was sending about the murder of Officers Ramos and Liu was: You see why we shoot before we ask questions with these people? Just leave us alone and let us do our job.
Twenty-five thousand police officers and sympathizers attended Officer Ramoss funeral in Glendale, Queens, on December 27, by far the largest turnout ever for such an occasion in New York. Thousands of cops came from departments within a couple of hundred miles of the city, and hundreds more flew in from Austin, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Durham. They presented a powerful counterforce to the Millions March of December 13, in Manhattan, where 30,000 protesters called for police reform. The funeral was a startling sight: armed men and women in full dress uniforms crammed together in a working-class neighborhood of sloping streets, aluminum siding, and tin eyelid awningsa mixed district of Serbians, Poles, Hispanics, and Irish.
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The NY Police vs. the Mayor
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