[T]he scene outside Woodhull Hospital wasn’t entirely supportive. “You’re a bunch of killers,” a passerby told cops standing sentry there, according to one police source. And short distance from the crime scene—where a crowd was backed up by the police tape—a few members of the crowd repeated “fuck the cops” within earshot of a Daily Beast reporter.
One 30-year-old local who gave his first name only as Carlos, didn’t hear the fatal gunfire but saw the hysteria aftewards and walked to the police tape.
“A lot of people were clapping and laughing,” he said.
“Some were saying, ‘They deserved it,’ and another was shouting at the cops, ‘Serves them right because you mistreat people!’” he said.
Disgusting. Michael Brown was a robber and the best evidence suggests he fought with a police officer over his gun and then rushed the officer. Eric Garner, in my opinion, did not deserve the level of force he experienced, but the police officer whose actions resulted in Garner’s death clearly did not intend that result, and Garner’s poor health obviously contributed to his death.
There is a sickness in society and a hatred of police who are trying to protect the public. Sensible people need to stand up and say: enough.
Will we see the same protests that occurred after the Michael Brown and Eric Garner grand jury decisions? Yes, the suspect is already dead, but symbolic unity that ALL lives matter…including blue lives (police) shown on the streets of America wouldn’t be a bad thing, now would it? So will we see Al Sharpton–who apparently helps govern now via his unofficial offices from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to 30 Rock to Sony Pictures — do more than just issue a public statement, and actually lead rallies around the deaths of Officer Liu and Officer Ramos (both of whom were minorities), the kind he’s so accomplished at assembling?
Of course he won’t.
Will the New York Jets exit the tunnel on Sunday before their home game with the Patriots while striking a “Hands down, don’t execute” pose in support of the NYPD? Will the St. Louis Rams — who host the Giants on Sunday — provide a repeat performance of their “Hands up, don’t shoot” protest from two weeks ago? Will that group of protesters in Manhattan a few weeks ago — who reportedly chanted (and you can watch and listen for yourself here) “What do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want it? Now!” — feel any remorse whatsoever for their rhetoric? Even if you dismiss the Daily Beast accounts above since there is no tape, how can anyone defend what is clearly heard and repeated on that video about dead cops?
I was standing on the West Side of Manhattan and talking to a cop about everything that has happened around here lately, about demonstrations that began after the cop who put Eric Garner down was not indicted in Staten Island.
“Other than our own people,” the cop said, “who speaks up for us these days?”…
You wonder how much all the re-training that Mayor de Blasio talks about — this mayor who has distanced himself from the rank and file of his own police force, who plays to the crowd by suggesting that the best police force in this country and this world needs to do so much better — helps two dead cops near Myrtle and Tompkins?…
Jimmy Breslin once wrote in this newspaper, “Dies the victim, dies the city.” Dies a cop dies the city.
Sickened by these barbaric acts, which sadly are a predictable outcome of divisive anti-cop rhetoric of #ericholder & #mayordeblasio. #NYPD
— George E. Pataki (@GovernorPataki) December 21, 2014
A throng of NYPD officers at New York’s Woodhull Hospital turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio as he arrived at a press conference on the execution-style murder of two New York cops, with police union president Pat Lynch claiming the mayor has “blood on [his] hands.”…
Many NYPD officers were angry at de Blasio even before the killings, accusing the mayor of inciting weeks of protests and maligning an entire police department after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to try the cop who killed Garner…
“There is blood on many hands tonight — those that incited violence on the streets under the guise of protest, that tried to tear down what New York police officers did every day,” the union president told the media Saturday night. “That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.”
Former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, a major proponent of the Stop and Frisk policies that current Gotham Mayor Bill de Blasio made a major issue in his campaign, told ABC News Sunday morning that de Blasio ran an “anti-police campaign,” part of the reason officers turned their backs on him during a press conference Saturday night.
“I think when the mayor made statements about how they had to train his son [Dante], who is biracial, to be careful when he’s dealing with the police, I think that set off this latest firestorm,” Kelly said.
“And, quite frankly, the mayor ran an anti-police campaign last year when he ran for mayor,” Kelly said. “I think a lot of the rhetoric was [anti-poice] at a time when the police had a 70% approval rating. Obviously that’s not the case now. They joined the de Blasio administration.”
The city’s cut-the-baby-in-half approach to the Garner-Brown protests — genuflect to the PBA, confer with the most rhetorically irresponsible of the protesting groups, rinse, repeat — lent an air of moral equivalence to the events leading up to Saturday’s savagery.
Nobody knows what was in the shooter’s mind, of course; happily, he relieved society of the responsibility of trying to find out with a well-placed bullet to his own head.
But anybody who thinks he wasn’t emboldened by City Hall’s placidity in the face of nihilistic, bloodthirsty incantations is delusional…
It’s wrong to blame the protests wholly for the actions of one person — up to a point.
That is, right up to the point when the protesters began to demand dead cops — and nobody put a stop to it.
Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) defended New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) on Sunday morning against criticism that he was partly to blame for the shooting death of two NYPD officers.
“I think the tone that the mayor is trying to set is a tone that brings people together,” Meeks said on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” He called comments made by Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch criticizing de Blasio “unfortunate.”
“We stand with the police department. No one has ever given up on the police department or said we were anti-police department. What we were crying for was just saying how African Americans feel — how their communities are policed,” the congressman said.
NAACP President Cornell William Brooks said it is “simply not fair” to blame politicians like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Attorney General Eric Holder for the deaths of two New York Police Department officers who were ambushed and killed by a gunman in Brooklyn on Saturday.
“To link the criminal insanity of a lone gunman to the peaceful protests and aspirations of many people across the country including the attorney general, the mayor and even the president is simply not fair,” Brooks said in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday…
“Think about it this way: The tears of the families of these police officer sand the tears of Eric Garner’s family and Michael Brown’s families aren’t shed in law enforcement blue, racially black or brown. They’re colorless, they’re tragic and unnecessary,” he said.
As soon as news broke of the tragedy in Brooklyn, I spoke with both the families of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. And let me be perfectly clear, we are all outraged and saddened by the deaths of these police officers. Any use of the names of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, in connection with any violence or killing of police, is reprehensible and against the pursuit of justice in both cases.
At every rally and every march, we have stressed nonviolence and peaceful protests.
I delivered the eulogy at Michael Brown’s funeral and Eric Garner’s funeral and denounced anyone engaging in violence. We have even been criticized at National Action Network, NAN, for not allowing certain rhetoric/chants calling for violence, and we would abruptly denounce it at all of our gatherings. Violence never has and never will have a place in the true fight for equality and justice…
Both the Brown and Garner families send their condolences to the families of these brave police officers who were in our community serving citizens that were in need of protection. Only those who have suffered the senseless loss of a loved one understand that pain. The city must come together and protect both police and citizens. We should not be choosing between funerals; we should be choosing justice and fairness for all.
Just as Sarah Palin’s defense of gun rights has zero culpability in the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords and Dallas’s right-wing “climate of hate” had nothing to do with Marxist-Leninist Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassinaton of JFK, it’s worth underscoring at every moment of what is already shaping up as a very ugly debate that the actual killer is the culprit here.
As the New York Daily News and other outlets are reporting, the apparent shooter was not only violent and unhinged but had bragged via Instagram that he was “putting wings on pigs” and “putting pigs in a blanket.”
The distance between such rantings and, even worse, the act of shooting policemen sitting in a patrol car, simply has no relation to legitimate and even impassioned criticism of the militarization of police and the protesting of specific acts of apparent injustice.
To suggest otherwise is not simply disgraceful and cheapening to serious public discourse. It’s all too often the first refuge of people on the right and the left who are afraid to actually engage in any sort of meaningful debate.
My problem with media coverage of violence is that the media and sometimes even public authorities reflexively and without any evidence blame conservatives and conservative ideas for violence. And that ignorant blaming of conservatives always seems to turn out to be incorrect later. After those two issues comes my final point: much of the high-profile violence that gets blamed on conservatives actually come from folks in at least one (and sometimes more than one) category: crazy, leftist, or Islamist.
Nasty rhetoric may contribute to a crazy killer or leftist killer or Islamist killer’s self-justification for his actions. But it generally is not the cause of premeditated violence. We should be cautious about blaming the anti-police rhetoric that followed the grand jury verdicts in Ferguson and on Staten Island without more evidence. That’s what the media does to us and it usually turns out wrong.
If it is true that Ismaaiyl Brinsley was motivated by rhetoric then that is a really big deal. But I don’t know why he killed those police officers and neither do you yet. Generally, however, rhetoric doesn’t just set somebody off. Wait for more facts. And, if you’re betting, he’ll probably fall into one of the other categories when this all shakes out.
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