The flashing red lights of a police car could be seen blocks away, stationed on the corner where two New York officers had been gunned down in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood.
A makeshift memorial of candles and flowers had been created next to the place where Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were shot dead while parked in their patrol car on Saturday. Some cried as they placed bunches of flowers at the scene. Others shook hands with police officers stationed nearby.
Relations between the NYPD and city residents have been strained as nationwide protests against systemic racism and police brutality have highlighted the disparity between police treatment of white people and minorities.
In New York City last month, a grand jury voted not to indict an NYPD officer who put a 43-year-old unarmed black man, Eric Garner, in an illegal choke hold, causing his death. Garner’s final words, “I can’t breathe”, have been a rallying cry for demonstrations since that decision was announced.
New York mayor Bill de Blasio has also been criticised by the police union for what it saw as his support for such protests.
At the Woodhull Medical Center, where de Blasio and NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton held a press conference on Saturday night in which they named the dead officers and the suspect in the killings, 28-year-old Ismaaiyl Brinsley, police turned their backs on the mayor.
Pat Lynch, the president of the city’s main police union, said there was “blood on the hands [of] those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protest … [blood] on the steps of city hall, in the office of the mayor”.
On Sunday night, President Barack Obama called Philadelphia police commissioner Charles Ramsey, who he has asked to co-chair a task force to examine policing practices across the US, to express his outrage over the Brooklyn killings.
Obama asked Ramsey to use his task force to further his message that such acts against police are to be condemned, the White House said.
On the streets, New Yorkers were anguished by the latest violence. Gary Pate moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant, known as Bed-Stuy, from Brownsville to get away from that neighbourhood’s endemic violence. While he is still angry about the grand jury’s decision in the Garner case, as well as the other police killings that have marked 2014, he was insistent that nobody wanted the police shooting to happen.
“We know that cop shouldn’t have put his knees, his arms, on [Garner], because the man was telling him he can’t breathe – he was suffocating,” Pate said. “But now, what is this [shooting] going to lead to? Is it open season on all of us?”
Brinsley travelled from Baltimore to Brooklyn on Saturday after shooting and wounding his former girlfriend. NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton said Brinsley had made “very anti-police” comments on Instagram that day, but investigators were working to determine a specific motive for the killings.
What they do know is that officer Liu got married recently and officer Ramos has a 13-year-old son.
They also know that Ramos was behind the wheel of the parked patrol car and Liu was in the passenger seat when Brinsley appeared at about 3pm and shot both men in the head. Bratton said the officers may not have even have had time to see their assailant and that their weapons were not drawn. Brinsley fled to a nearby subway station and shot himself on the platform.
While Brinsley has ties to East Flatbush in New York City, investigators are trying to determine where he was living at the time of the shooting and whether he had planned the killing in advance. His last known residence was in Georgia, where he was convicted of felony gun possession in 2011.
Junior Fortin is a lifelong Bed-Stuy resident and full-time father. He brought a candle to the memorial, a few blocks from where he lives. Two of his best friends were NYPD officers, he said.
“It’s just sad, it is going to separate us,” Fortin said. “It’s not going to make the cops trust us if we don’t trust them.”
Fortin, who is black, said he had felt afraid to go outside in case he was accused of doing something he had not done, or was even shot by police. But he said he had faith that the justice system could be improved.
“For all that to work, we have to come together and talk together without yelling at each other and pointing at each other,” Fortin said.
The intense reaction to the Garner case was in part bred by the killing of the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer, Darren Wilson. The incident incited raging protests in the city near St Louis this August and extended globally as a greater movement against systemic racism.
Brown’s family condemned the Brooklyn shootings in a statement made through their lawyer. The Rev Al Sharpton spoke on behalf of the Garner family, saying he and they were outraged by the shooting. “The Garner family and I have always stressed that we do not believe that all police are bad, in fact we have stressed that most police are not bad,” Sharpton said.
De Blasio has trodden carefully since the Garner decision, applauding the work of the NYPD while also refusing to endorse the grand jury’s vote. In an interview earlier this month, De Blasio said he and his wife, Chirlane McCray, who is black, had had many conversations with their teenage son Dante, warning him to “take special care” in any encounter with police officers.
New York City cardinal Timothy Dolan said the city stood in solidarity with de Blasio at a St Patrick’s Cathedral mass yesterday, where the mayor stood alongside Bratton. “Our beloved city needs the peace … that only our lord can give,” Dolan said.
Nas Hills splits his time between Baltimore and Brooklyn – in a building across the street from where the shooting occurred. “It’s not a war zone out here,” Hill said, but the shooting has made him wary about raising his daughter in the neighbourhood.
“Even around here, you could usually chill … it’s going to be different,” Hills said. “They aren’t going to want us outside.”
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