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Get a link in your mailbox to your weekly NYPD Confidential column as soon as it is published! Click on the button above right on this page — or here — to sign up for this feature. Jimmy O'Neill's Learning CurveJuly 17, 2017 Was the killing of Officer Miosotis Familia a watershed moment for NYPD Commissioner Jimmy O’Neill?
O’Neill may have sounded like a hard-liner, but he is not. In fact, at his swearing-in ceremony at Police Plaza nearly a year ago, NYC first lady Chirlane McCray, quoting his son, described O’Neill as a “chronic do-gooder.” As commissioner, he is attempting to re-engage the police with the city’s black communities through what he is calling “neighborhood policing,” a policy abandoned by Ray Kelly as “community policing” and disparaged by Rudy Giuliani as “social work.” Mayor Bill de Blasio has, albeit hyperbolically, called O’Neill’s approach “the most significant reorganization of police patrol in 50 years.”
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O’Neill himself has been guilty of this. In his first month in office, he blamed a sergeant in the fatal shooting of a mentally disturbed black woman in the Bronx before the investigation was completed. Police said the woman had attacked the sergeant with a baseball bat. He was later charged with second-degree, or intentional, murder. We’re four decades past the Black Liberation Army, which assassinated police officers as part of a political agenda. Now we have individuals like Bonds, often with mental illness, acting alone and justifying their actions as retaliation for past grievances. In 2014, a black man from Baltimore came to NYC and fatally shot officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in their patrol car Brooklyn, ostensibly in retaliation for the deaths of black men by police. As O’Neill put it at Familia’s funeral service: “All her killer could see was a uniform. …He blamed the police for his own terrible choices in life. …” He added: “Here are the numbers we don’t talk about nearly enough. Miosotis is our seventh cop to be shot and killed in just the last five years. … Across our nation, 135 police officers were killed in the line of duty last year, the sharpest spike in the last five years. … “I don’t know how else to say it. This was an act of hate in this case against police officers. … Miosotis was targeted, ambushed and assassinated. She wasn’t given a chance to defend herself. That should matter to every single person who can hear my voice in New York City and beyond.” There is precedent for this. Back in the day, then the-U.S.Attorney for the Southern District Robert Morgenthau tried his longtime nemesis, Roy Cohn, three times. He lost all three. Even if the feds never convict Silver, his trials will cost him millions. For Silver, isn’t money what it’s all about? |
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