Cops Who Lost Life, Not Cops Who Took Life
December 1st, 2006
Clyde Haberman in the New York Times (for subscribers only) writes of a court case in Brooklyn of defendants accused of shooting to death two undercover police officers, Detectives James V. Nemorin, 36, and Rodney J. Andrews, 34, who had five children between them. This case in Brooklyn may seem unrelated to the far more publicized police shooting in Queens of Sean Bell on what was to be his wedding day over the Thanksgiving holiday. “But they are two faces of the same New York story,” Haberman writes. “Both involve police undercover work that went disastrously wrong, although in different ways.The very nature of this work can lead to nightmarish situations because, by definition, undercover officers are supposed to melt into their surroundings. Snap decisions — when to back off, when to make arrests, certainly when to shoot — are rarely uncomplicated or without peril.”
An editorial in the New York Post, entitled Selective Sympathy, derives other lessons from the contrasting cases, harshly criticizing Al Sharpton and Charles Barron and Jesse Jackson for “comforting the grieving family of Sean Bell – a black man shot dead in Queens by police – for at least as long as the TV cameras lingered” but being absent in Brooklyn Federal Court where the murder trial of the two black detectives is taking place. “Sharpton and Barron and Jackson care only about certain dead black people.”
The New York Police Department’s official Web site lists the names of the hundreds of members of the department who have been killed in the line of duty since 1849
By Jonathan Mandell on December 1, 2006, 6:39 amIn category: Crime & Safety, Gotham City | No Comments »
