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 In his 13 years on the force, Hamm had never encountered
demonstrators shouting out anything like that.
Nor had he ever seen anything like what happened one week later, on
Saturday: a lone gunman, hours after warning on Instagram that he
planned an attack in retribution for U.S. police killings of black
men, gunned down two NYPD officers as they sat in a cruiser in broad
daylight near a bustling intersection in Bedford Stuyvesant,
Brooklyn.
The officers, who were Hispanic and Asian-American, were killed by a
28-year-old black man, Ismaaiyl Brinsley. He had traveled to New
York from Baltimore, where he had earlier shot and wounded his
girlfriend. Brinsley fled and later used his silver semi-automatic
handgun to take his own life by shooting himself in the head on a
crowded subway platform.
“When you have a chant going on like that, and no one addresses it,
and then a week later, these killings come to fruition, I’m shaken,”
said Hamm, an African American, whose usual stint is in the
conditions unit in the 106th precinct in Queens. “The rhetoric
that’s going around, left unchecked, is very dangerous, and it
invites people to do crazy nonsense.”
 The killing of the two police officers Saturday comes at a time when
police in New York already feel vulnerable. A wave of national
protests has targeted them for what demonstrators have characterized
as their “aggressive” and “extreme” tactics. That includes the
controversial “stop and frisk” program, in which thousands of black
and Latino men were targeted for no ostensible reason other than the
color of their skin.
Though the protests have been largely peaceful, tensions have been
escalating, with people brandishing placards reading “NYPD KKK,”
“NYPD Has Blood on Their Hands” and “Speak Up Get Shot.”
Defenders of the actions, however, say that drawing a connection
between the protests and the police killings would be “misleading.”
One of the movements leaders, the Missouri-based Ferguson Action
Network, said in a statement: “Millions have stood together in acts
of non-violent civil disobedience, one of the cornerstones of our
democracy. It is irresponsible to draw connections between this
movement and the actions of a troubled man who took the lives of
these officers and attempted to take the life of his ex-partner,
before ultimately taking his own.”
The nationwide wave of protests, which have snarled traffic, clogged
bridges and brought commerce to a standstill, started in late
November after a Missouri grand jury declined to indict a white
police officer in the killing of unarmed black teen Michael Brown. A
week later, a New York grand jury also declined to indict a white
officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, an unarmed,
43-year-old black father of six suspected of peddling loose, untaxed
cigarettes.
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In the wake of those decisions, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose
wife Chirlane is African American, said in a press conference that
the couple has had to have painful conversations with their biracial
son, Dante, about “how to take special care with any encounter he
may have with police officers.”
Police organizations immediately blasted the mayor’s comments as
anti-cop. On Saturday, Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President
Patrick Lynch said, “The blood on the hands starts on the steps of
City Hall, in the office of the mayor.” That same night, as the
Mayor arrived at the Brooklyn hospital where the two dead officers
were taken, a line of patrolmen turned their backs on him, forming a
line of blue in what observers called a dramatic show of disrespect.
During his campaign, de Blasio criticized NYPD tactics like “stop
and frisk” and the “broken windows” theory of policing, which
focuses on cracking down on small crimes to prevent bigger ones.
Both strategies flourished under de Blasio’s predecessors, Rudy
Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg. Both Mayors oversaw a record drop in
crime which transformed New York from the former murder capital of
the world into the safest big city in America—and the preferred
playground of the global elite.
But now, police say the tension between the NYPD and the Mayor’s
Office at City Hall is the worst it has been in recent memory.
On Sunday, police officers said that more and more of them were
signing a new petition asking de Blasio not to attend their funerals
if they should die in the line of duty.
“This is a very, very volatile time,” said a 15-year narcotics vet
who asked not to be named because police officers are prohibited
from speaking with the press without department permission. “Any
situation on either side in this city could really set things off.
It really could."
(Reporting By Michelle Conlin)
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