Every police officer’s death is difficult. Some happen in other states or municipalities and policemen take a quiet moment to reflect. Sometimes it’s only a moment. Sometimes it lingers a little longer.
Other times, it sparks a conversation about tactics or a bout of Monday-morning quarterbacking, the act of second-guessing what the slain officer did or didn’t do, something you shamefully keep to yourself.
And other deaths knock the wind out of you. You find a corner by your locker, loosen your stiff upper lip and cry for a minute. These particular murders command their own page in history because they represent an erosion of this city’s character and an attack on our livelihood.
They hark to “societal issues of the 1970s which are revisiting us again,” which was recently pointed out by Police Commissioner William Bratton. There is no greater societal ill or blight on a city than the murder of a police officer.
Police Officers Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones, 1971; Police Officers Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie, 1972; Detectives James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews, 2003; and now Police Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.
Police assassinations are upon us again, and the list of accomplices is lengthy.
Mayor de Blasio, who has a well-documented history of anti-establishment and counterculture behavior, has astoundingly supported the NYPD’s efforts to curb crime utilizing George Kelling’s “broken-windows theory.’’ The mayor, unfortunately, has failed to truly grasp the concept, which in layman’s terms theorizes that petty crime will eventually lead to more serious crime.
When you allow protesters a wide berth to exercise their First Amendment rights in the form of blocking traffic and suffocating our city’s bridges, this will naturally graduate to minor destruction of property. When that form of uncivil disobedience goes unanswered, the natural progression continues to the destruction of police property and assaults on police officers in the form of spit or synthetic blood.
When those methods are further unchecked, a policy of acquiescence coming straight from City Hall, the natural progression continues. It comes in the form of the gang assault of two NYPD Legal Bureau lieutenants on the Brooklyn Bridge, ironically assigned to oversee the fair application of the law during the protests.
A proverbial window was broken, Your Honor. You did nothing. A few real windows were broken. You did nothing. A police car’s windshield was broken. You did nothing. An NYPD lieutenant’s nose was broken. You did nothing. On Saturday, two policemen’s families lives weren’t just broken. They were shattered.
Police Commissioner Bratton should not remain unsullied by the assassination of those two offices, either. Bratton’s name belongs in rarefied law-enforcement air alongside Robert Peel, August Vollmer and Theodore Roosevelt, but I long for him to guide the department through its current storm in a way.
Gerard G. Collins is an active member of the New York City Police Department serving in the Midtown South Precinct.