Two NYPD officers wounded a day after tense Ramos funeral

[January 06, 2015]  (Reuters) - Two New York City policemen were shot and wounded on Monday night, officials said, a day after events at a funeral of a colleague killed in an ambush last month fueled tensions between the force and the city's mayor.

The officers, part of a plainclothes unit, were shot outside a Chinese restaurant in the Bronx district as they tracked two suspects to an armed robbery, New York Police Commissioner William Bratton told a news conference early on Tuesday.

One, aged 30, was in a critical condition at a local hospital after being shot in the arm and lower back. The second man, aged 38, was stable with chest and arm wounds.

The policemen returned fire, possibly wounding one of the suspects, who then fled on foot before stealing a white sports car they later ditched. Police recovered a black revolver near the scene, Bratton said.

Speaking at the same news conference, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio described the men, who had just ended their shifts, as "extraordinarily brave."

City police had turned out in their thousands on Sunday for the funeral of Rafael Ramos, who was killed on Dec. 20 as he sat in his patrol car. Hundreds turned their backs on de Blasio when he delivered the eulogy.

The killer, who also shot dead Ramos's NYPD colleague Wenjian Liu, 32, said he wanted to avenge the deaths of two unarmed black men in encounters with white officers in Ferguson, Missouri, and in New York City last summer.

Relations between police unions and de Blasio, a liberal Democrat in his first year in office who campaigned on a promise of police reform, deteriorated after he expressed sympathy for the nationwide protests that took place during the summer over killings by police.

Bratton and de Blasio earlier on Monday announced a continued decline in serious crime in the city in 2014, which the mayor called a record-breaking year.

But both said they could not rule out the possibility that a sharp drop in police activity since Ramos and Liu were killed was a symptom of widespread police insubordination.

(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Nick Macfie and John Stonestreet)

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