Ismaaiyl Brinsley murder of officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos put police on alert
Two uniformed NYPD officers were shot dead Saturday afternoon as they sat in their marked police car on a Brooklyn street corner. Investigators believe was a crazed gunman’s assassination-style mission to avenge Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Monday morning, Fox News reports police across the country are on alert: “Wear bulletproof vests. Avoid posting inflammatory statements on social media. Don’t make arrests unless you have to. Don’t patrol alone.”
“No warning, no provocation — they were quite simply assassinated, targeted for their uniform,” Police Commissioner William Bratton said of the shooting.
Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were working overtime as part of an anti-terrorism drill when they were shot point-blank in the head by lone gunman Ismaaiyl Brinsley.
The officers’ photos are below.Brinsley, 28, had vowed in an Instagram post to put “wings on pigs” as retaliation for the slayings of black men at the hands of white police. That said, the slain New York Police Department officers were Hispanic and Asian.
“I’m Putting Wings on Pigs Today,” Ismaaiyl Brinsley wrote. “They Take 1 Of Ours . . . Let’s Take 2 of Theirs,” the post continued, ending with, “This May Be My Final Post.”
Fox summarizes the police reaction:
After the officers’ killings, a union-generated message at the 35,000-officer NYPD warned officers that they should respond to every radio call with two cars — “no matter what the opinion of the patrol supervisor” — and not make arrests “unless absolutely necessary.” The president of the detectives union told members in a letter to work in threes when out on the street, wear bulletproof vests and keep aware of their surroundings.
Another directive warned officers in Newark, New Jersey, not to patrol alone and to avoid people looking for confrontations. At the same time, a memo from an NYPD chief asked officers to limit their comments “via all venues, including social media, to expressions of sorrow and condolence.”
In Philadelphia, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey urged the leaders of protests over the deaths of Garner and Brown to “call for calm and not let this escalate any further.” In Boston, Police Commissioner William Evans said police issued an alert to officers to warn them about the New York City slayings and added that the department had issued several alerts following the decision by the Ferguson grand jury.
[…] for the two New York Police Department officers killed in an ambush attack last December by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who had shot his girlfriend earlier in the day, and then […]
Were Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s actions simply the cumulative act of a ‘troubled man’ with a ‘death wish’ with a history of mental illness looking to impart his own ‘special brand of justice’ or is that idea too simplistic and convenient in the face of the reality that we live in a society that historically and systematically discriminates and brutalizes African American males and that such a reaction (however reprehensible) was only inevitable ….. or is that an idea we ought to best ignore???
http://scallywagandvagabond.com/2014/12/ismaaiyl-brinsley-cop-killer-have-a-death-wish-attempted-suicide/