When Can This Be Stopped: NY's Finest Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora Shot In the Head While On Duty

 

Jason Rivera (left) and Wilbert More (right)

From Betsy Combier:

We believe in our nation's finest, the men and women who serve to protect us all. Defunding the police is nonsense, built up by hysterical people who in the end profited greatly from the sheeple who followed this insane road to social disorder.

Should officers of the law be given additional training? Absolutely, training in what to do in panic-driven situations where people with guns may be having mentally unstable episodes is a good place for taxpayer money. Let's do that, pronto.

Betsy Combier

betsy.combier@gmail.com

Editor, ADVOCATZ.com

Editor, ADVOCATZ Blog

Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials

They served us all: NYPD Officer Jason Rivera is dead and his partner Wilbert Mora is in critical condition because of an angry man with a stolen gun

NY DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL BOARD, January 22, 2022

First, we mourn. Angrily, we mourn. For a man wielding a gun stolen in Baltimore five years ago — a grotesque weapon with a high-capacity magazine holding up to 40 rounds — has cut down two of New York’s Finest. Jason Rivera, a 22-year-old rookie and son of Inwood who had written earnestly his desire to “better the relationship between the community and the police,” is dead. Wilbert Mora, just five years his senior, lies in critical condition at Harlem Hospital.

Two officers with careers of service ahead of them and a third partner were responding to a mother’s 911 domestic violence call about her son. As they headed down the hall after a brief conversation with her and another son, police say Lashawn McNeil came out shooting. The 47-year-old was on probation after a 2003 felony drug charge; he had four arrests in other states including assaulting a police officer in Pennsylvania and a North Carolina gun charge.

Fortunately, the third officer present shot and wounded the man who had just put bullets in his partners’ flesh.

There is a sickness in this city. Twenty-two days into 2022, Rivera and Mora are the fourth and fifth cops hit with gunfire. New York is awash with firearms, and crawling with people emboldened to believe they can squeeze the triggers and risk or take lives without facing serious, certain consequences.

And there is a still deeper sickness in this nation — when, even as there are already far too many weapons already in the hands of far too many criminals, the Supreme Court stands poised to invalidate New York’s strict gun laws, effectively allowing anyone to be legally armed anywhere.

As the city wipes its tears and channels its rage, it falls to Eric Adams, as suited to rise to this challenge as any mayor in recent memory, to lead the charge to staunch the flow of deadly weapons into the five boroughs — and, just as if not more critical, to ensure that those who demand those guns, who put bullets in their chambers and wantonly squeeze their triggers at civilians and cops, know that there will be hell to pay for the lives they destroy and the fear they instill. May his honor find willing, able allies in every quarter.

‘It’s a significant injury’: Surviving NYPD officer rushed to brain surgery after Harlem shooting, sources say

by Mary Murphy, PIX11, Jan. 22, 2022

HARLEM, Manhattan (PIX11) — Wilbert Mora, the 27-year-old police officer who was shot in the head Friday night, and survived the gunfire that killed a fellow officer, was rushed into surgery “to alleviate swelling in the brain,” two high-ranking law enforcement sources told PIX11 News on Saturday.

Both Mora and NYPD officer Jason Rivera were shot in the head, the sources said. Rivera, 22, died from his injuries.

The two young officers had been responding to a domestic incident involving a mother and son. Chief of Detectives James Essig announced Friday evening a Glock .45 was recovered near a back bedroom in the apartment where the shooting took place on West 135th Street in Harlem.

Rivera, a rookie officer, and son of immigrants, was carried by fellow cops across the street to the emergency room of Harlem Hospital but was pronounced dead. Mora’s condition was grave, as well. Police described his condition on Saturday as still “critical.”

“He was rushed immediately up to the O/R,” a law enforcement official told PIX11 News about Mora. “It’s a significant injury. We hope he makes it through … It was a large-caliber bullet, a .45, which is a very significant, very powerful ammunition.”

Regarding the high-quantity magazine that was attached to the bottom of the Glock, the source noted, “It’s like a drum, a small drum. It can hold 40-50 bullets. It makes an ordinary handgun into a killing machine.”

Who was NYPD officer Jason Rivera? Rookie cop killed in Harlem shooting

Mora, who joined the NYPD in 2018, was with Rivera and another officer from the 32nd Precinct responding to a domestic incident at the home. A mother called 911 about her 47-year-old son, identified by police as Lashawn McNeil, an ex-convict with multiple arrests for narcotics and weapons possession. McNeil was on probation for a drug conviction in New York City.

When the police arrived at the apartment, they spoke to the mother and another son in the front room. Nothing was mentioned about McNeil being armed. That’s when Mora and Rivera approached the back bedroom.

Chief Essig said Friday night McNeil suddenly opened the door and ambushed them with rapid gunfire. The law enforcement official said the incident was a reminder that “Everything has the potential to turn deadly … quickly.”

NYPD officers shot: Suspect Lashawn McNeil was on probation, previously arrested for assaulting cop, police say

On Saturday afternoon, PBA President Patrick Lynch released a statement from his police union, saying, in part, “In the coming days, New Yorkers will get to know these heroes. What they’ll find is they know them already. They are your sons. They are your husbands, fathers, and brothers. They are your neighbors. They walked these city streets beside you.”

On Friday night, Lynch had asked the public to come to Rivera’s funeral to show support for the men and women in NYPD Blue, who are trying to stem the gun violence in New York City. He repeated that call Saturday.

“We respectfully ask you, once again: please join us to mourn Police Officer Jason Rivera as if he was your own flesh and blood. And please pray hard for our injured brother, because he is your brother, too.”

Mapping Police Violence

Violent attacks against police officers on the rise in 2022

More Utah officers were shot at in 2021 than in recent history. Here’s why officials say violence against police is rising.

Michael C. Dorf: Civilian Control of the Police

January 14, 2015

MICHAEL C. DORF

Civilian Control of the Police 

in NYC

LINK

Roman emperors formally staked their power on Senate recognition, but in practice their authority depended on support from the legions and the Praetorian Guard. Despite its republican traditions, in its imperial phase, Rome was a dictatorship—sometimes a benevolent one, but a dictatorship nonetheless—because truly representative government demands civilian control of state force. For that reason, Article II of the U.S. Constitution makes the President, a civilian, Commander in Chief of the armed forces.

As with the nation, so with its parts. Thus, recent actions by a not inconsiderable number of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers to challenge the authority of Mayor Bill de Blasio by refusing to enforce the law should raise loud alarms. Police officers are entitled to express pointed disagreement with their civilian leaders, but when that disagreement crosses the line into defiance, democracy itself is threatened.

The Underlying Dispute

In considering where to draw the line between permissible protest and mutiny, it is important to set aside the substance of the underlying disagreement. That may be difficult to do in this instance, because the position of protesting NYPD officers is, not to put too fine a point on it, ugly.

Consider the now-infamous statement of NYC Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch that Mayor de Blasio had “blood on his hands” for the murder of officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu by a man who may have drawn some inspiration from anti-police-brutality protesters but was clearly a dangerous and deranged criminal.

What, exactly, did de Blasio do to render himself culpable in the killing of Ramos and Liu in the eyes of Lynch and his supporters? In the wake of a Staten Island grand jury’s failure to issue an indictment for the choking death of Eric Garner, de Blasio had the temerity to speak the indisputable truth that young African American men like his own son are at elevated risk in encounters with the police. De Blasio has repeatedly acknowledged the difficult and dangerous work that police do, but that was not enough to satisfy Lynch, who sees police–civilian interactions in Manichean terms: Because de Blasio does not offer all NYPD officers 100 percent backing in everything they do, Lynch denounces him.

Legitimate Speech

Police Chief William Bratton and some supporters of Mayor de Blasio have criticized the NYPD officers who turned their backs on the mayor at the funerals for Ramos and Liu on the ground that they were exploiting a tragedy to make a political point. That is a legitimate criticism of the officers’ judgment, but the officers were within their rights to exercise bad judgment or even to give offense. Although not entirely analogous, the Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling in Snyder v. Phelps underscores the proposition that the First Amendment protects offensive speech, even offensive speech that aims to use a funeral for political purposes.

More broadly, police officers have a right to speak out on matters of public concern, even if doing so could be seen as somewhat undermining the authority of their civilian leaders.

As a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote in the 1892 case of McAuliffe v. Mayor of New Bedford that a plaintiff who had been fired from his position as a police officer “may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.” Yet constitutional law long ago rejected the Holmesian view that the state may, as a condition of employment, suppress otherwise protected speech.

Under the modern employee speech doctrine, public employees do not forfeit their right to speak as citizens on matters of public concern simply by virtue of accepting a government job. Government may not suppress such speech by its employees unless doing so is necessary to the effective provision of services.

The NYPD officers who turned their backs on Mayor de Blasio were expressing an odious view, but they were nonetheless “speaking” as citizens on a matter of public concern. And while the incidents caused embarrassment to the mayor, the police commissioner, and others, they did not interfere with the provision of police protection in any clear way.

To see why the First Amendment protects NYPD officers in expressing their displeasure with the mayor, imagine that they were making a different point. Suppose that in the wake of the Garner non-indictment, the mayor gave a public speech praising the NYPD for its aggressive use of force, and that some officers turned their backs at that speech. Surely many of the people who now condemn the NYPD officers for their treatment of Mayor de Blasio would praise the hypothetical officers for their courage in confronting their leaders, for speaking truth to power.

An Illegal Strike

Police officers also have a legal right to another kind of speech. They can organize to form a union that, in turn, can collectively bargain on their behalf. Some of the issues that are legitimately subject to collective bargaining are also matters of public policy. For example, whether police must be outfitted with body cameras is both a matter of working conditions for the police and civil rights of the public.

But New York law generally denies to public employees the right to strike. Whatever the merits of the general provision, the reason for the prohibition of police strikes is obvious. A strike in some other sector may cause financial losses and public inconvenience, but a strike by the police threatens the very foundation of government.

The NYPD are not formally on strike, but over the last several weeks, the number of arrests and tickets for relatively minor offenses as well as some not-so-minor offenses (such as gun possession and drunk driving) reportedly declined substantially. Although there is no clear evidence of a coordinated refusal by police to enforce the law, the same report (a New York Timesstory) indicates at least informal coordination. Call it a stealth strike.

Whether overt or covert, a police strike is dangerous and illegal. Where, as appears to be true here, the tacit strike threatens the public safety unless elected leaders give in to the strikers’ policy demands, democracy itself is under attack. There is no place in New York or America for a Praetorian Guard.

[ 6:42 ] Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download (76)
Michael C. Dorf, a Justia columnist, is the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell University Law School and the principal author of The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Constitutional Law. He blogs at DorfonLaw.org.

- See more at: http://verdict.justia.com/2015/01/14/civilian-control-police-nyc#sthash.UhfuNImG.dpuf