Police
Among blacks and
Latinos, resentment toward NYPD lingers
NEW YORK — In the months after the
9/11 terrorist attacks, New Yorkers venerated the city’s police force, wearing
NYPD baseball caps and T-shirts, stopping to hug officers on street corners and
delivering food and flowers to their precincts.
A poll five months after the 2001
attacks found that 76 percent of New Yorkers approved of the department’s
performance. Even among black New Yorkers — a population with a historically
tenuous relationship with cops — the Quinnipiac University survey showed a
favorable rating of 56 percent.
But more than a decade later, New York
police are the target of fury, much of it triggered by a grand jury’s
recent failure to indict an officer in the chokehold
death of Eric Garner. The ruling, and ensuing protests, set the stage for an
assassin to travel from Maryland to New York to execute two police officers in their patrol
car this past Saturday as they were parked outside a housing project in
Brooklyn.
“The cops are too aggressive,” Darren
Fisher, 25, said two days later, as he stood outside another housing project in
a different part of Brooklyn, a Miami Heat baseball cap pulled down over his
head. “No matter what, they feel like they’re above the law and nothing ever
happens to them.”
That kind of rancor grew out of two
decades of aggressive police tactics that began during the administration of
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) and flourished under his successor, Mayor Michael
R. Bloomberg (I).
Two New York police
officers shot to death in Brooklyn
Vie 
w Photos
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Police
say Ismaaiyl Brinsley ambushed the officers, fatally shooting them before
killing himself inside a subway station.
In particular, fierce opposition grew
during Bloomberg’s mayoralty toward the department’s widespread practice of
“stop and frisk,” in which officers routinely detained hundreds of thousands of
New Yorkers — most of them African American and Latino men.
In 2013, a federal judge described the
tactic as a form of racial profiling and ruled that it violated minorities’
constitutional rights. And while the department is phasing out “stop and
frisk,” resentment toward the police remains palpable, particularly among
blacks and Latinos…
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