In wake of police killings, New York officers on edge (Reuters) - On December 13, as thousands of protesters mobbed the New York streets, Yuseff Hamm, an NYPD police officer, was monitoring the demonstrations from a mobile command unit near the Brooklyn Bridge. As the protest drew near, Hamm and his fellow officers could hear the chants of the noisy throngs: “What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want them? Now.” 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.” More here community.adlandpro/forums/post/2413654/ARE-WE-NOW-IN-THE-END-TIMES.aspx?id=11743937#a_post_11743937 Below: A man walks past some fresh graffiti very near the site where two police officers were shot in the head in the Brooklyn borough of New York, December 21, 2014. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 10:10:14 +0000
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