NY mayor calls for pause in protests

Associated Press

NEW YORK

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called Monday for a pause in protests over police conduct as he faced a widening rift with those in a grieving force who accuse him of creating a climate of mistrust that contributed to the execution of two officers.

“I think it’s important that, regardless of people’s viewpoints, that everyone step back,” de Blasio said in a speech Monday at the Police Athletic League. “I think it’s a time for everyone to put aside political debates, put aside protests, put aside all of the things that we will talk about in all due time.”

De Blasio’s relations with the city’s police unions have tumbled to an extraordinary new low — one not experienced by a mayor in the nation’s largest city in more than a generation — in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting in which the gunman claimed was retaliation for the deaths of black men at the hands of white police. In a display of defiance, dozens of police officers turned their backs to de Blasio at the hospital where the officers died, and union leaders said the mayor had “blood on his hands” for enabling the protesters who have swept the streets of New York this month since a grand jury declined to indict an officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner.

“We are working toward a day where we can achieve greater harmony toward policing and community,” de Blasio said later Monday.

Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were ambushed Saturday afternoon by a 28-year-old who vowed in an Instagram post that he would put “wings on pigs.” The suspect, Ishmaaiyl Brinsley, was black; the slain New York Police Department officers were Hispanic and Asian.

The killings came as police nationwide are being criticized after Garner’s death and 18-year-old Michael Brown’s fatal shooting in Ferguson, Mo. Protests erupted after grand juries declined to charge officers in either case.

De Blasio said it was time to focus on the officers’ grieving families. He and Police Commissioner William Bratton met with them earlier Monday.

“There’s a lot of pain. It’s so hard to make sense of it — how one deeply troubled, violent individual could do this to these good families,” a somber de Blasio said.