On Dec. 8, New York city council members took to the streets to block traffic in solidarity with demonstrators demanding changes in policing.
Council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito opened a meeting of her fellow council members with a call to utter the protest mantra, “I can’t breathe,” the final words of a man killed by a police chokehold.
On Friday last week, the mayor sat down with leaders of the demonstrations, heeding their appeal for a face-to-face meeting, even as they vowed to continue disrupting the city.
Photo: Reuters
The gestures served as an unabashed embrace by the city’s unabashedly liberal elected leaders, a sign that protest organizers, after weeks in the streets, had begun the process of channeling raw anger into real change.
Then, on Saturday last week, in the seconds it took to shoot two New York Police Department (NYPD) officers dead in Brooklyn, the ground shifted beneath the marching feet of the thousands of people who had made New York the center of protests over the killing of unarmed black men by the police.
Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were gunned down as they sat in their patrol car at a busy intersection.
They were killed by a man who hours earlier announced his intentions on Instagram and invoked the names of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man killed by a chokehold in July, and Michael Brown, a man killed by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer in August.
The gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, killed himself minutes later, the police said.
The killing of the officers, coming five days before Christmas, stunned the city into collective mourning. In an instant, criticism of the police seemed out of touch. “Die-ins,” which had become a staple of demonstrations in Grand Central Terminal, City Hall and elsewhere, suddenly struck a discordant note, and as the city prepared for today’s burial of Ramos, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio asked protesters to suspend their demonstrations until the officers’ funerals were over.
The groups had already been grappling with their future, working on ways to retain the energy and diversity of younger protesters while exploiting the organizational assets of established civil rights groups.
Now, they face an even more pointed test.
“This is par for the course,” Reverend Michael Walrond told protesters after a march through Harlem on Sunday last week, the day after the officers were killed.
“You were called for such a time as this. Don’t get tired. Don’t get weary,” he said.
Indeed, though some groups were willing to stand down, others balked. Along with the protest on Sunday, led by Justice League NYC, a demonstration was held on Tuesday along Fifth Avenue. Another protest is scheduled to take place in Brooklyn today, the same day as Ramos’ funeral.
Communities United for Police Reform executive director Joo-Hyun Kang said halting the protests would be misguided.
“It is wrong to connect the isolated act of one man who killed NYPD officers to a nonviolent mass movement,” she said. “Silencing the countless voices of New Yorkers who are seeking justice, dignity and respect for all, is a mistake.”
Just how dramatic the turnabout has been in New York could be measured by a scene that unfolded this week at city hall. There were no council members blocking traffic, there were no choruses of “I can’t breathe” and there were no mayoral meetings with protesters.
Instead, there was unstinting praise for the police from council speaker Mark-Viverito, who earlier this month had asked her colleagues to repeat “I can’t breathe” 11 times, for the number of times Garner said those words before he died in the encounter with the police.
“We are here to send a simple and direct message: that we unequivocally support, appreciate and value our police officers, that we condemn any and all violence against them, that we must end hateful and divisive rhetoric which seeks to demonize officers and their work,” Mark-Viverito said at a news conference.
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