Mayor Bill De Blasio has asked for a temporary pause in protests in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of two NYPD officers. We hear from four activists - Mark Winston Griffith, Monifa Bandele, Opal Tometi and Josmar Trujillo - on what comes next.
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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Protesters are marching once again in the streets of New York City.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: What do we want?
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTORS: Justice.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: When do we want it?
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTORS: Now.
Stand down!
Mayor de Blasio called Monday for a moratorium on demonstrations and political bombast until the two slain officers who were executed by a lunatic over the weekend are laid to rest.
“I think it’s a time for everyone to put aside political debates, put aside protests, put aside all of the things that we will talk about in due time,” Hizzoner said at a Police Athletic League luncheon.
“I think it’s important that, regardless of people’s viewpoints, that everyone recognizes a time to step back and just focus on these families.”
Queens officials, clergy and community leaders have organized three events to honor the two police officers assassinated Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn by a career criminal out to avenge the deaths of two black men at the hands of cops this summer.
The officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were shot as they sat in their patrol car outside a housing complex in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
When many families are home lighting the menorah for the first night of Hanukkah, an interfaith coalition will use the spirit of the holiday to demand an end to racial profiling and police brutality.
Last year, eyewitnesses were certain that 16-year-old Kimani Gray was unarmed when two plainclothes officers shot him seven times in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. But the officers alleged that Gray pointed a .38-caliber Rohm's industry revolver at them.
Aggrieved family members demanded justice. Protests were held. Riots ensued. No one was indicted.
You can only take to the streets in protest for so long before people start asking, 'what is it that you want exactly?'
And so it has gone with the rallies and marches in response to the non-indictment of Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo by a Staten Island grand jury called to consider charges against him in the July 17 chokehold death of Eric Garner.
Following the chokehold death of Eric Garner at the hands of a New York Police Department officer, activists are demanding wide-reaching institutional changes to the way the department does business.
Garner, a 43-year-old black man, died on July 17 after a white police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, strangled him in an attempt to arrest him for selling untaxed cigarettes.
A day after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, two of most powerful men in the state, said they are interested in passing major criminal justice reforms during next year's legislative session.
NEW YORK – Many Jews were among the thousands of people who marched in New York City streets Thursday night protesting the decision by a grand jury not to put a white police officer on trial for causing the death of an unarmed black man. More than two dozen demonstrators, including several leading rabbis, were arrested on the Upper West Side after they sat down in the middle of a major intersection in an act of civil disobedience