NEW YORK — A gunman shot dead two New York City police officers in what officials called an “assassination,” hours after he warned on social media that he planned an attack in retribution for recent police killings of unarmed black men.
Mayor Bill de Blasio on Sunday ordered flags flown at half staff around the city, hours after the city’s main police union harshly criticized the city’s first Democratic mayor in two decades for being insufficiently supportive of the department during recent waves of anti-police violence.
The shooter, 28-year-old Ismaaiyl Abdula Brinsley, traveled from Baltimore, where police said he had shot and wounded his former girlfriend, to New York and during the day posted on the social media service Instagram that he would be “putting wings on pigs today.”
Baltimore police said they learned of the suspect’s posts Saturday afternoon and called NYPD officials to alert them that digital data showed he had traveled to the city’s borough of Brooklyn. But the call came in less than an hour before officials said Brinsley, who was black, shot and killed two officers as they sat in their patrol car near a major housing project.
The officers he killed were Hispanic and Asian-American.
“Although we’re still learning the details, it’s clear that this was an assassination, that these officers were shot execution-style,” said de Blasio, who campaigned on a promise to improve relations between the nation’s largest police force and minority communities.
The two New York City Police Department officers, Rafael Ramos, 40, and Wenjian Liu, 32, had no time to react when Brinsley appeared next to their vehicle, took a shooter’s stance and shot both officers through the passenger side with a silver semi-automatic handgun, NYPD Police Commissioner William Bratton said.
Brinsley fled to a nearby subway station where he shot himself in the head and died, Bratton added.
The attack, the first fatal shooting of an NYPD officer since 2011, follows weeks of sometimes violent protests around the country over a pair of incidents in which white police officers shot and killed unarmed black men. In July, a police officer in New York’s Staten Island borough killed Eric Garner, a father of six, while trying to arrest him for illegally selling cigarettes.
In August, a police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed an 18-year-old Michael Brown after an argument that began while Brown was walking in the middle of the street on a residential block after allegedly stealing a box of cigarillos from a convenience store.
In each case, grand juries that reviewed the deaths concluded that the police officers involved had broken no laws. The decisions not to charge the officers added to protesters’ anger.
Brinsley cited both cases in the Instagram post in which he threatened police, saying “they take 1 of ours … let’s take 2 of theirs.”
President Barack Obama condemned the killings, saying “two brave men won’t be going home to their loved ones tonight.” Attorney General Eric Holder promised the support of the Justice Department throughout the investigation.
Leaders of recent anti-police protests, including longtime New York civil rights activist the Reverend Al Sharpton, also condemned the attack.
Bratton said investigators were checking whether Brinsley had attended any of the recent protests.
About 100 protesters, part of a group who recently met with de Blasio to call for police reforms, held a demonstration Sunday night in Harlem. In contrast to usually boisterous protests critical of police, participants marched in silence bearing candles.
One of the longest-standing U.S. civil rights groups, the NAACP, on Sunday joined in condemning the attack but warned against tying it directly to the recent anti-police demonstrations.
“There is no connection between the peaceful protest of thousands of people of all races all over the country and, indeed, around the world, and this hideous act of violence,” the group’s legal defense fund said in a statement.
The killings also revealed bitter anger among some police toward Mayor de Blasio, who they see as unsupportive in the face of public anger.
Several officers turned their backs on de Blasio when he arrived at the Brooklyn hospital where the two officers were taken after they were shot, video showed.
Patrick Lynch, head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the country’s largest municipal police union, said, “There’s blood on many hands tonight. … That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor.”
It was unclear why the gunman chose Brooklyn.
Across the country, police departments were on edge Sunday after the attack in New York and another in Florida. A police officer on duty outside Tampa was shot to death early Sunday and a suspect has been arrested, local authorities reported. There was no indication yet of a motive.
The St. Louis Police Officers Association on Sunday asked the department to step up security, while Baltimore’s police union said the current political environment was the most dangerous for officers since the 1960s.