De Blasio weathers NYPD storm Anger as two NY police shot dead Two NYPD officers ‘assassinated’ before anger turns on mayor – in pictures Opinion: ‘Wartime’ NYPD blames protesters. Have we learned nothing?
New York City mayor Bill de Blasio speaks to the media during a news conference at Woodhull Medical Center on Saturday.Photograph: John Taggart/EPA
It was a cold, cloudy and quiet morning in Brooklyn’s
Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, but from blocks away in many directions
the flashing lights of a cop car could be seen. The car was stationed
on a corner opposite the spot where two New York Police Department
officers were killed on Saturday afternoon.
A makeshift memorial of candles and flowers had appeared where
officers Wenjian Liu, 32, and Rafael Ramos, 40, were shot while sitting
in their parked patrol car. Some cried as they laid flowers; others
shook hands with police officers stationed nearby.
Such gestures were striking. Relations between the NYPD and residents
have been strained in recent months, as nationwide protests have
focussed on the disparity between police treatment of white people and
minorities. In New York last month, a grand jury voted not to indict an
NYPD officer who put a 43-year-old black man, Eric Garner, in an illegal
chokehold, causing his death. Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe”,
have become a rallying cry for demonstrations.
On Saturday night, police union representatives voiced their anger
over such protests and what they saw as support for them from the city’s
mayor, Bill de Blasio. At the Woodhull Medical Center, where de Blasio
and NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton held a press conference in which they
named the dead officers and the suspect in the killings, 28-year-old
Ismaaiyl Brinsley, police turned their backs on the mayor.
Speaking outside the hospital, Pat Lynch, the leader of the
Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said there was “blood on their hands
[of] those that incited violence on the street under the guise of
protest … [blood] on the steps of city hall, in the office of the
mayor”.
The Twitter feed of the
Sergeants Benevolent Association contained a similar controversial
statement: “The blood of 2 executed police officers is on the hands of
Mayor de Blasio. May God bless their families and may they rest in
peace.”
On Sunday the former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly added to criticism from authority figures including George Pataki, the former New York state governor, and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani.
“When the mayor made statements about having to train his son, who is
biracial, to be careful around the police, I think that set off this
firestorm,” Kelly said on ABC, adding that he thought “the mayor ran an
anti-police campaign last year when he ran for office”. NYPD officers turn their backs on mayor Bill de Blasio.
De Blasio has walked a delicate line in the wake of the Garner
decision, which he refused to endorse. In an interview earlier this
month, the mayor said he and his wife, Chirlane McCray, who is black, have had many conversations with their teenage son, Dante, warning him to “take special care” in any encounter with police officers.
“It’s a painful conversation,” de Blasio said. “We all want to look
up to figures of authority and everyone knows the police protect us. But
there is that fear that there could be that one moment of
misunderstanding with a young man of color and that young man may never
come back.”
On Sunday, de Blasio and Bratton attended mass at the city’s St
Patrick’s Cathedral, where Cardinal Timothy Dolan – who a week ago wrote
a controversial newspaper op-ed piece
in which he said “it’s only pouring kerosene on the fire when some
upset leaders caricature our dedicated police officers as bigots” – said
the city was “in solidarity” with its mayor.
“Our beloved city needs the peace that only our lord can give,” Dolan
said, before asking the congregation to “pray for consolation for [the
officers’] sobbing families”.
Gary Pate said he had moved to Bed-Stuy from Brownsville, to get away from that neighborhood’s endemic violence.
While he was still angry about the grand jury’s decision in the Garner
case, as well as the other police killings that have marked 2014, he was
insistent that nobody had wanted Saturday’s shooting to happen.
“We know that cop shouldn’t have put his knees, his arms, on that man
[Eric Garner] because the man was telling him he can’t breathe – he was
suffocating,” Pate told the Guardian. “But now, what is this [shooting]
going to lead to? Is it open season on all of us?”
Brinsley travelled from Baltimore to Brooklyn on Saturday, after shooting and wounding his former girlfriend.
Bratton said at the Saturday press conference that Brinsley had made
“very anti-police” comments on the social media platform Instagram that
day, but added that investigators were working to determine a specific
motive for the killings.
What they do know is that Officer Liu had recently married and
Officer Ramos has a 13-year-old son, Jaden, who posted a message to
Facebook.
“This is the worst day of my life,” he wrote. “Today I had to say bye
to my father. He was there for me everyday of my life, he was the best
father I could ask for. It’s horrible that someone gets shot dead just
for being a police officer. Everyone says they hate cops but they are
the people that they call for help.”
Investigators also know that when Brinsley appeared on Tompkins
Avenue, around 3pm, Ramos was behind the wheel of the parked patrol car
and Liu was in the passenger’s seat. Brinsley assumed a firing stance
and shot both men in the head. Bratton said the officers may not have
had time to see their assailant and that their weapons were definitely
not drawn.
Brinsley then fled to a nearby subway station, where he shot himself, fatally, in the head.
Brinsley had ties to East Flatbush in New York City, but
investigators were trying to determine where he was living at the time
of the shooting and whether he had planned it in advance. His last known
residence was in Georgia, where he was convicted of felony gun
possession in 2011, according to court records.
Junior Fortin is a lifelong Bed-Stuy resident and full-time dad. He
brought a candle to the memorial, a few blocks from his home. He said
two of his best friends are NYPD officers.
“It’s just sad, it is going to separate us,” Fortin said. “It’s not going to make the cops trust us if we don’t trust them.”
He said that even though he is black and had in the past felt afraid
to go outside, in case of being accused of doing something he didn’t do
or even of being shot by police, he had faith that the justice system
could be improved. “For all that to work, we have to come together and
talk together without yelling at each other and pointing at each other,”
he said. A girl places
flowers at a memorial to the two NYPD officers who were shot and killed
in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood on Saturday.Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The intense reaction to the Garner case was in part fomented by the
August killing of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson,
Missouri, by a white police officer, Darren Wilson. The incident led to
raging protests in the small southern city and extended globally as a
greater movement against systemic racism.
Brown’s family condemned Saturday’s shootings in a statement made through their lawyer,
while the Reverend Al Sharpton spoke on behalf of the Garner family,
saying he and they were “outraged” by the shooting. “The Garner family
and I have always stressed that we do not believe that all police are
bad, in fact we have stressed that most police are not bad,” Sharpton
said.
Nas Hills splits his time between Baltimore and Brooklyn, his home in
the latter in a Tompkins Houses building across the street from where
the shooting occurred. He said he and his uncle heard four or five shots
on Saturday afternoon but thought the noise came from firecrackers or
some other mischief, because it was daytime.
They looked across the street and saw cops coming from every
direction, then went downstairs, where Hills could see the officers’
bodies.
“It’s not a war zone out here,” Hill said. But he said the shooting
had made him wary about raising his daughter in the neighborhood.
“Even around here, you could usually parlay, chill,” he said.
“It’s going to be different. They aren’t going to want us outside.”
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