At ten o’clock on Saturday night, everything was calm at the intersection of Park and Tompkins Avenues, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn—one block north of where, seven hours earlier, a man named Ismaaiyl Brinsley allegedly killed two New York City police officers in an ambush. There were bright lights, rows of patrol cars, and few pedestrians. A pair of officers, both of them African-American, stood in the street and directed the passersby, calmly but firmly. They chatted with an older woman who needed to drive up Tompkins, and they smiled genially at a young woman who was walking down it.
That morning, Brinsley had shot his girlfriend in the stomach in Baltimore County, Maryland, and then headed north. His Instagram account declared his intention: “I’m Putting Wings On Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours…..Let’s Take 2 of Theirs #ShootThePolice #RIPErivGardner #RIPMikeBrown This May Be My Final Post.” The Baltimore County police tracked his postings and the location of his cell phone and sent a warning to their counterparts in New York—incongruously, in part via fax. By the time the warning arrived, Brinsley had drawn his gun and started firing through the passenger-side window of the patrol car in which Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were sitting. Both officers were hit in the head before they could respond. It had been two years and one week since the last time a New York City police officer was killed in the line of duty.
The intersection where the murder took place is just a couple of blocks from Woodhull Medical Center. But there must not have been any chance, and the two officers were soon pronounced dead. Ramos had just celebrated his fortieth birthday, and Liu had just been married. Brinsley fled into a nearby subway station, where he proceeded to kill himself. His silver handgun, which had been so clean in a picture on Instagram, would surface in police photographs with what looked like it might be a speck of blood by the trigger.
As with so many dramas of our day, social media did not bring out the best in observers. George Pataki blamed Bill de Blasio and Eric Holder. Others blamed Eric Garner, the officer responsible for Eric Garner’s death, the grand jury responsible for that officer’s freedom, or the protesters of that grand jury. The Sergeants Benevolent Association tweeted out a statement that was quite malevolent in its condemnation of the Mayor and his perceived lack of recent support for the police.
The actual scene was far calmer, though, than the virtual one. I spoke with officers at several intersections around the restricted zone, and they all seemed struck by tragedy but also at ease. This was nothing like the police force at the scene of Michael Brown’s death, in Ferguson. People walked by. A white man in a ski cap tried to persuade a policeman to let him bike down Tompkins. A small dog, looking like it might be half cocker spaniel, stood shivering, tied to a leash by a deli that straddled one police line.
Roger Brown, one of the officers at the corner of Park and Tompkins, said that he knew one of the men who had been killed. He’d seen him nearby that morning and they’d been joking around. I asked whether he thought that things would be different now. “It’s all going to be the same,” Brown said. “You can’t think about things too much or else you go crazy. You just have to do your job. And then you hope you get to go home at the end of the day.”
