NY Protesters Hope to Disrupt New Year’s Eve Celebration at Times Square

Daryl Khan

Protesters outside City Hall vowed to continue to fight for an end to police brutality despite Mayor Bill de Blasio's call for a moratorium after the assassination of two NYPD officers.

NEW YORK — The savage killing of two police officers has done nothing to ease the tension between protesters and the city and police department they hope to reform. In fact, divisions between the two sides appear to only have deepened. And with more protests planned for New Year’s Eve, the stand-off shows no sign of letting up.

Leaders of a group organizing demonstrations to protest the lack of an indictment in the choking death of Eric Garner snapped the olive branch Mayor Bill de Blasio had offered at a press conference in City Hall Plaza Tuesday afternoon.

In his first comments in the wake of the murder Saturday of two police officers in Bedford-Stuyvesant, de Blasio pleaded Monday with activists to suspend their protests against police brutality until the two slain officers — Wenjian Liu, 32,  and Rafael Morales, 40 — could be given a proper burial.

“This is a time for every New Yorker to think about these families. Focus on these families. Put them first,” he said. “We can do that by respecting their pain, respecting their time of mourning. I'm asking everyone — and this is across the spectrum — to put aside protests, put aside demonstrations. Until these funerals are past, let's focus just on these families, and what they have lost. I think that's the right way to try and build towards a more unified and decent city.”

In a steady rain beneath overcast skies, protest organizers from Stop Mass Incarceration Network, an organization dedicated to wholesale reform of what they call racist policing practices, delivered an unequivocal rejection of de Blasio’s proposal.

“There’s been no moratorium on the police killing our people,” said Travis Morales, head of the network’s New York chapter. “The police haven’t put aside murdering our people with impunity. We can’t back down.”

Carl Dix, a co-founder of the organization along with professor and activist Cornel West, said the mayor and police commissioner are trying to conflate cop killer Ismaayil Brinsley with the efforts of protesters exercising their constitutional rights and trying to bring an end to police brutality.

“Our message has nothing to do with violence,” he said. “This is not a slap in the face of the grieving members of the killed officers. Ours is a message to stop police brutality.”

Dix, a longtime activist, said he has never seen the movement to reform police abuse so robust.

“And now we’re being told to ease up, hold back, how about a moratorium,” he said. “No! They have no right to tell us we should back out of our protests, that we should silence our voices.”

Dix cited the case of Dontre Hamilton as a reason that protesters need to keep the pressure on to draw attention to police abuse in minority communities. Hamilton, a 31-year-old black man with a history of schizophrenia, was shot 14 times by an officer in a Milwaukee public park last April.

Police officer Christopher Manney, who was kicked off the force after the shooting, was found Monday to have acted in self-defense in the shooting. A spokesman for the Department of Justice said it would review the case.

Dix said the effort to reform police practices is particularly central to young people. He said it “criminalizes and demonizes the youth,” making it easier to ignore their treatment by the police.

“The kids are our future,” he said in comments after the press conference. “This criminal justice system treats them like they’re a problem to be penned up and locked up and thrown away.”

Organizers encouraged listeners to join a protest on New Year’s Eve, planned to reach Times Square and disrupt the ball drop at midnight.

Members of the organization stood behind the speakers silently holding a long roll of unfurled orange mock-police tape that stretched for nearly 100 feet. On it were printed the names of unarmed black and Latino men killed by the police in New York City and across the country: “Michael Brown killed in Ferguson. Sean Bell killed in Queens. Eric Garner in Staten Island.”

On either side of them a weak breeze jostled the American and city flags. They both hung at half-mast, out of respect for the slain officers.