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 But de Blasio's plea was quickly dismissed by several activist
groups that vowed to continue protests that have stirred the city
daily after grand juries chose not to indict police officers who
killed Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri.
"It's a time for everyone to put aside political debates, put aside
protests, put aside all of the things we will talk about in due
time," de Blasio said in a speech to a charity with close ties to
the New York Police Department, two days after Rafael Ramos, 40, and
his partner, Wenjian Liu, 28, were killed.
The men were shot as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn, and
their deaths electrified tensions that had been coursing for months
between City Hall, the police department and the reform-minded
protesters who voted for de Blasio in large numbers.
Similar protests, some of them violent, have taken place across the
United States, provoking a bitter debate about how American police
forces treat non-white citizens that has drawn in President Barack
Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder.
 Even de Blasio's assurance on Monday that he would attend the slain
officers' funerals, normally an unquestioned mayoral duty, took on a
political charge. Earlier this month, the city's largest police
union said the mayor had abandoned the police and urged members to
sign a letter insisting that the mayor stay away from their funeral
should they be killed while on duty.
Police identified the killer as Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who wrote online
that he planned to avenge the deaths of Garner and Brown, who were
both unarmed black men killed by white officers. Brinsley killed
himself with a shot to the head soon after.
"Let's comfort these families, let's see them through these
funerals," de Blasio said in his speech, hours after visiting the
officers' grieving families with Bill Bratton, the police
commissioner. "Then debate can begin again."
But the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist representing the
families of Garner and Brown, said de Blasio's call was too nebulous
to heed.
"Is a vigil a protest? Is a rally?" Sharpton said in a telephone
interview, calling de Blasio's comments "an ill-defined request."
Sharpton, who joined Garner's relatives over the weekend to denounce
the slaying of the officers, said he would not change planned prayer
vigils at the scene of Garner's death and elsewhere over the coming
days to mark the family's first Christmas without him.
A "CHILL" ON SPEECH
The Answer Coalition, an activist group, denounced the mayor's plea
as an "outrageous" attempt to "chill" free expression. It said it
had no intention of cancelling a long-planned protest march on
Tuesday evening.
At least one small candle-light vigil called for by a separate
coalition of groups took place in Brooklyn on Monday evening, an
organizer said.
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De Blasio's remarks came two days after his tense relationship with
the city's police unions and rank-and-file officers hit its lowest
ebb when two union leaders said the mayor had "blood on his hands"
for the officers' deaths. The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association
and the Sergeant's Benevolent Association have accused de Blasio, a
Democrat who ran for office on a platform of police reform, of
helping incite a loathing of police through public remarks noting
that he understood some of the protesters' grievances.
Even if protesters say they will not be quieted, the heads of the
city's police unions had agreed to suspend any lobbying efforts tied
to the protests until after both officers are buried, Bratton said.
Investigators said a video on Brinsley's cell phone showed him
filming a protest against excessive police force at New York's Union
Square Park.
Rejecting the unions' arguments, de Blasio said the attack should
not be tied to the recent protests, which in New York have been
largely peaceful. But some protesters said the mayor sent the
opposite message by using Brinsley's actions as a reason to
temporarily stop protests.
The grand juries that considered the killings of Brown and Garner
decided the police officers involved broke no laws. On Monday, a
Milwaukee prosecutor said a police officer there would not be
charged for the fatal shooting of a black man in April.
The officer in the Milwaukee shooting, who was white, was fired in
October for failing to follow police procedure. As in the Garner and
Brown cases, the U.S. Justice Department is now considering whether
civil rights laws were broken in that case.
 (Additional reporting by Sebastien Malo in New York, Bill Trott,
Susan Heavey and Ian Simpson in Washington and Richard Weizel in
Milford, Connecticut; Writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Howard
Goller, Grant McCool and Ken Wills)
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