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Miosotis Familia and the Killing of Innocents
July 10, 2017
Take a person with mental issues and a violent past, who in poor NYC neighborhoods is often a black man like Alexander Bonds.
Couple that with an anti-police narrative and generations of racial discord, including the fatal shootings by white NYPD officers of innocent black New Yorkers— i.e., 10-year-old Clifford Glover in Queens in 1973; 15-year-old Randolph Evans in Brooklyn 1976; and 22-year-old Amadou Diallo in the Bronx 1999.
The result: equally innocent NYPD victims like Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in 2014, and last week Officer Miosotis Familia, who was assassinated by Bonds as she sat inside her vehicle.
These tragic incidents reflect the longstanding and seemingly insoluble distrust between black New Yorkers and the NYPD that cannot be resolved by anodyne words, such as those offered by Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“A female police officer attacked out of nowhere is clinging to her life,” the mayor said, shortly after Familia, a mother of three young children, was shot. “The commissioner and I met with her family and it’s a very, very difficult moment for all of them.”
Then, while hundreds of cops and ordinary citizens massed outside Familia’s 46th Precinct in the Bronx to mourn her loss, the mayor winged off to the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, in his quixotic pursuit to lead a progressive agenda.
His actions vis-à-vis the NYPD are no less quixotic. Many blamed him for helping to create a climate of violence that led another mentally disturbed black man from Baltimore to come to NYC and assassinate Ramos and Liu as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn.
Since then, de Blasio has become the NYPD’s “biggest supporter,” as a top official recently put it — at least when it comes to money. He supported hiring 1,300 additional officers to help fight terrorism. He now supports the bullet-proofing of all department vehicles, such as the one Familia was seated inside when she was killed.
He’s also pushing what he and Police Commissioner Jim O’Neill call “Neighborhood Policing,” a policy that gives officers the time “to engage with neighborhoods as never before,” as the mayor recently wrote in Spring 3100, a department publication. Whether this becomes “the most significant reorganization of police patrol in 50 years,” as he put it, remains to be seen.
At the same time, the mayor sandbagged O’Neill after a sergeant’s fatal shooting last October of Deborah Danner, an emotionally disturbed black woman, who, police say, attacked him with a baseball bat. Police had responded to her apartment, where she lived alone, alerted by neighbors who heard her screaming inside.
After O’Neill said, “We failed … There was a persons in crisis. We were called to her apartment … and we ended up killing her,” the mayor took O’Neill’s heartfelt apology to a new and prejudicial level.
Conveying a tone O’Neill had not intended, the mayor criticized the sergeant’s tactics, then concluded with: “Deborah Danner should be alive today. Period.”
Last month, Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark indicted the sergeant for second-degree, or intentional, murder. That’s an overcharge. The result will be more distrust between black New Yorkers and the NYPD.
OSCAR LOPEZ RIVERA [Cont'd
]. Here’s another footnote debunking City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito’s hero-worship of Oscar López Rivera of the FALN. It comes from retired transit cop Robert Marks.
“In 1983, I spent nine days in Bellevue after finding myself on the wrong end of a knife while working as a plainclothes officer with the NYC Transit Police. Around the seventh or eighth day, I was feeling a little down and couldn't wait to get released. I heard a knock on the hospital room door and a uniformed cop asked me if I could use a little company. He wheeled in Officer [Richard] Pastorella who had lost a limb as a result of this terrorist organization's bombing. [Pastorella was one of three NYPD cops seriously wounded in the 1983 New Year’s Eve blast at Police Plaza.] Imagine how humbled I felt; here I was almost ready to go home and this guy, minus his leg, is coming to cheer me up. I'll never forget his upbeat, cheerful demeanor. A true gentleman and hero.”
