NYC Mayor: No Politics Amid Cops’ Families’ ‘Unspeakable Pain’
Published at | Updated at(NEW YORK) — New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday urged people to set aside politics and protests to support and comfort the families of the two slain NYPD officers who are “suffering unspeakable pain.”
It’s time for those of different viewpoints to “put aside political debates, put aside protests, put aside everything we will talk about in due time while two families try to piece their lives back together,” he said at a gathering of the Police Athletic League.
The remarks were the mayor’s first public comments since the police union said he had blood on his hands over the Saturday shooting deaths of Officers Wenlian Liu and Rafael Ramos. De Blasio avoided a direct confrontation over the incendiary rhetoric.
He said the Liu and Ramos families “experienced the worst possible moment a family could.”
He called the incident “an attack on democracy, an attack on our values, an attack on every single New Yorker.”
The mayor and New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton also visited the families of the fallen officers on Monday, three days after both men died in an attack in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.
The pair did not speak to reporters as they entered and exited the home.
The Ramos family said they would welcome de Blasio at Ramos’ funeral in spite of an effort started by the largest police union last week — before the shootings — to have officers sign petitions to keep the mayor from their possible funerals.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had stopped by Liu’s home moments before de Blasio and Bratton.
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