The tragic shooting deaths of two New York City police officers in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn over the weekend is a grim reminder of how America has lost its way, allowing hatred, partisanship, and revenge to overwhelm tolerance, cooperation, and reason.
Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were sitting in their car near Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues when Ismaaiyl Brinsley fired several shots without warning. Police and city officials called the attack an assassination.
Patrick Lynch, the head of the Police Benevolent Association, said it was a sign of how Mayor Bill de Blasio had made police a target. Others shot disdainful looks at President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney Eric Holder, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and the tens of thousands of protesters who have expressed outrage after several incidents in which white police officers have killed unarmed black men and children without facing charges.
Regrettably, very few people in positions of authority noted or took stock of the violence that permeates our society at a time when crime is steadily declining. That Brinsley was armed with a misguided grudge, a silver Taurus 9-millimeter handgun, and a history of mental issues was ignored during the effort to score rhetorical points.
Take Lynch for example. The head of the NYPD's largest police union was quick to say that the officers' blood "starts on the steps of City Hall" in general and "in the office of the mayor" in particular. He also lead a protest in which police officers turned their backs on the mayor at the hospital where the officers were pronounced dead.
Others have warned that the shootings of the two officers, both of whom are being mourned by their family, friends, fellow officers, and the citizenry, were acts of war.
According to a message attributed to police, but which the PBA denies issuing, the NYPD has become "a 'wartime' police department."
"We will act accordingly," the missive declared.
Meanwhile, a who's who of reactionary Republican politicians from former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to former New York Gov. George Pataki to U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, assailed de Blasio for expressing support for the rights of protesters, saying he had created a dangerous climate for police officers by indulging lawlessness.
Ignored, of course, is a very basic truth: when police and civilians do not trust each other, do not work together, do not seek common ground then we are all in danger. And when those who are supposed to lead retreat to their partisan rhetorical corners nothing will ever be accomplished.
Let us understand some very simply things. America has married the worship of guns to a delegitimizing of authority -- an authority often steeped in abuse and overreach. Because Brinsley allegedly cited the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson as reasons for his rampage, few people are looking at the things that are at the heart of such violence.
The deaths of Officers Liu and Ramos are not the manifestation of protests against excessive police abuse. Nor are their deaths the desired result that most people sought in voicing their displeasures with police actions. Their deaths can be tied to a mental health system that is almost non-existent, our gun culture, the inability to see each other's humanity, the rationalization of excessive violence in the name of safety, and on and on and on.
When James Eagan Holmes opened fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., on July 20, 2012, conservatives, Republicans, and the National Rifle Association went to great lengths to blame the violence on a single twisted mind, arguing that those deaths had nothing to do with lax gun policies and over the top rhetoric that adulated guns. The same occurred when Adam Lanza killed 26 innocent children in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012.
We heard it again when many defended the torture of prisoners by the Central Intelligence Agency, and others decided that Garner died not because of pressure applied to his throat and chest, but because he was obese and had asthma.
The humanity of those who died was denied.
For example, in making his claims that the citizenry hates the police, Lynch failed to recognize that it was the mother of Brinsley's shooting victim in Baltimore who sought to help police find him, and it was two civilians who followed an armed and dangerous Brinsley to the subway station so as to point him out to police.
Members of a society that hates police do not take such action. Yes, there are those who in their ignorance will rejoice in the officers' deaths. Such people are not reflective of society. Many people in this country have either friends or relatives who are police officers, and those people worry each night if those loved ones will return home.
It is the same with civilians who wonder if their parents, siblings, relatives, and friends will make it home at night, who fear that a life can be easily snuffed by a person puffed on his or her own sense of authority.
It is why everyone who seeks to end or to at least curb the violence must speak up.
So far, it has been the protesters and the families of those who have suffered the most at the hands of the violence that have been the most reasonable.
"I hope and pray that we can reflect on this tragic loss of life that has occurred so that we can move forward and find an amicable path to a peaceful coexistence," Lucy Ramos, an aunt of Officer Rafael Ramos, said late Sunday afternoon.
"An act of violence is against humanity," Carmen Perez, a co-founder of Justice League NYC, told The New York Times in an interview. "It's not mutually exclusive. We can mourn Eric Garner and the two officers. It's O.K. to do that."
Indeed it is.
"We need to use the pain that all of us are experiencing and turn it into purpose," Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain and current Brooklyn borough president, said, adding that "calling for police reform is not a call for harm of police officers."
Adams' words reflect the reasonable response that many seek and the city so desperately needs. To question police department tactics and policies is not to attack police.
The problem is that for too many anything short of total capitulation and admiration of the police is an attack on the nation's men and women in blue.
But somewhere along the line, the good police and the good citizens have to come to grips with a fundamental truth: As long as the bad guys operate with impunity, regardless of whether they are police officers or rogue citizens, all of us are in danger.
And no amount of partisan rhetoric will change that.
Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were sitting in their car near Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues when Ismaaiyl Brinsley fired several shots without warning. Police and city officials called the attack an assassination.
Patrick Lynch, the head of the Police Benevolent Association, said it was a sign of how Mayor Bill de Blasio had made police a target. Others shot disdainful looks at President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney Eric Holder, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and the tens of thousands of protesters who have expressed outrage after several incidents in which white police officers have killed unarmed black men and children without facing charges.
Regrettably, very few people in positions of authority noted or took stock of the violence that permeates our society at a time when crime is steadily declining. That Brinsley was armed with a misguided grudge, a silver Taurus 9-millimeter handgun, and a history of mental issues was ignored during the effort to score rhetorical points.
Take Lynch for example. The head of the NYPD's largest police union was quick to say that the officers' blood "starts on the steps of City Hall" in general and "in the office of the mayor" in particular. He also lead a protest in which police officers turned their backs on the mayor at the hospital where the officers were pronounced dead.
Others have warned that the shootings of the two officers, both of whom are being mourned by their family, friends, fellow officers, and the citizenry, were acts of war.
According to a message attributed to police, but which the PBA denies issuing, the NYPD has become "a 'wartime' police department."
"We will act accordingly," the missive declared.
Meanwhile, a who's who of reactionary Republican politicians from former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to former New York Gov. George Pataki to U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, assailed de Blasio for expressing support for the rights of protesters, saying he had created a dangerous climate for police officers by indulging lawlessness.
Ignored, of course, is a very basic truth: when police and civilians do not trust each other, do not work together, do not seek common ground then we are all in danger. And when those who are supposed to lead retreat to their partisan rhetorical corners nothing will ever be accomplished.
Let us understand some very simply things. America has married the worship of guns to a delegitimizing of authority -- an authority often steeped in abuse and overreach. Because Brinsley allegedly cited the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson as reasons for his rampage, few people are looking at the things that are at the heart of such violence.
The deaths of Officers Liu and Ramos are not the manifestation of protests against excessive police abuse. Nor are their deaths the desired result that most people sought in voicing their displeasures with police actions. Their deaths can be tied to a mental health system that is almost non-existent, our gun culture, the inability to see each other's humanity, the rationalization of excessive violence in the name of safety, and on and on and on.
When James Eagan Holmes opened fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., on July 20, 2012, conservatives, Republicans, and the National Rifle Association went to great lengths to blame the violence on a single twisted mind, arguing that those deaths had nothing to do with lax gun policies and over the top rhetoric that adulated guns. The same occurred when Adam Lanza killed 26 innocent children in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012.
We heard it again when many defended the torture of prisoners by the Central Intelligence Agency, and others decided that Garner died not because of pressure applied to his throat and chest, but because he was obese and had asthma.
The humanity of those who died was denied.
For example, in making his claims that the citizenry hates the police, Lynch failed to recognize that it was the mother of Brinsley's shooting victim in Baltimore who sought to help police find him, and it was two civilians who followed an armed and dangerous Brinsley to the subway station so as to point him out to police.
Members of a society that hates police do not take such action. Yes, there are those who in their ignorance will rejoice in the officers' deaths. Such people are not reflective of society. Many people in this country have either friends or relatives who are police officers, and those people worry each night if those loved ones will return home.
It is the same with civilians who wonder if their parents, siblings, relatives, and friends will make it home at night, who fear that a life can be easily snuffed by a person puffed on his or her own sense of authority.
It is why everyone who seeks to end or to at least curb the violence must speak up.
So far, it has been the protesters and the families of those who have suffered the most at the hands of the violence that have been the most reasonable.
"I hope and pray that we can reflect on this tragic loss of life that has occurred so that we can move forward and find an amicable path to a peaceful coexistence," Lucy Ramos, an aunt of Officer Rafael Ramos, said late Sunday afternoon.
"An act of violence is against humanity," Carmen Perez, a co-founder of Justice League NYC, told The New York Times in an interview. "It's not mutually exclusive. We can mourn Eric Garner and the two officers. It's O.K. to do that."
Indeed it is.
"We need to use the pain that all of us are experiencing and turn it into purpose," Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain and current Brooklyn borough president, said, adding that "calling for police reform is not a call for harm of police officers."
Adams' words reflect the reasonable response that many seek and the city so desperately needs. To question police department tactics and policies is not to attack police.
The problem is that for too many anything short of total capitulation and admiration of the police is an attack on the nation's men and women in blue.
But somewhere along the line, the good police and the good citizens have to come to grips with a fundamental truth: As long as the bad guys operate with impunity, regardless of whether they are police officers or rogue citizens, all of us are in danger.
And no amount of partisan rhetoric will change that.
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