After Killing of Police Officers, Protest Movement Is at a Crossroads

City Council members took to the streets in New York to block traffic in solidarity with the demonstrators demanding changes in policing. The Council speaker opened a meeting of her fellow Council members with a call to utter the protest mantra, “I can’t breathe,” the final words of a Staten Island man killed by a police chokehold. And last Friday, the mayor sat down with leaders of the demonstrations, heeding their appeal for a face-to-face meeting even as they vowed to continue disrupting the city.

The gestures served as an unabashed embrace by the city’s unabashedly liberal elected leaders, a sign that protest organizers, after weeks in the streets, had begun the process of channeling raw anger into real change.

Then, on Saturday, in the seconds it took to shoot two officers dead in Brooklyn, the ground shifted beneath the marching feet of the thousands of people who had made New York the center of protests over the killing of unarmed black men by the police.

Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were gunned down on Saturday afternoon as they sat in their patrol car at a busy intersection in Bedford-Stuyvesant. They were killed by a man who hours earlier announced his intentions on Instagram and invoked the names of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man killed by the chokehold in July, and Michael Brown, the man killed by the Ferguson, Mo., police in August. The gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, killed himself minutes later, the police said.

The killing of the officers, coming five days before Christmas, stunned the city into collective mourning. In an instant, criticism of the police seemed out of touch. “Die-ins,” which had become a staple of demonstrations in Grand Central Terminal, City Hall and elsewhere, suddenly struck a discordant note. And as the city prepared to bury Officer Ramos on Saturday, Mayor Bill de Blasio asked the protesters to suspend their demonstrations until the officers’ funerals were over.

The groups had already been grappling with their future, working on ways to retain the energy and diversity of the younger protesters while exploiting the organizational assets of established civil rights groups.

Now, they face an even more pointed test.

“This is par for the course,” the Rev. Michael A. Walrond Jr. told protesters after a march through Harlem on Sunday, the day after the officers were killed. “You were called for such a time as this. Don’t get tired. Don’t get weary.”

Indeed, though some groups were willing to stand down, others balked. Along with the protest on Sunday, led by Justice League NYC, a demonstration was held on Tuesday along Fifth Avenue. Another protest is to take place in Brooklyn on Saturday, the day of the funeral for Officer Ramos.

Joo-Hyun Kang, executive director of Communities United for Police Reform, said halting the protests would be misguided.

“It is wrong to connect the isolated act of one man who killed N.Y.P.D. officers to a nonviolent mass movement,” she said.

“Silencing the countless voices of New Yorkers who are seeking justice, dignity and respect for all, is a mistake.”

On Monday, the group Ferguson Action tweeted, “The N.Y.P.D. wants to use this tragedy to silence this movement. Not gonna happen.”

Ashley Yates, a member of Ferguson Action and a co-founder of Millennial Activists United, said she knew immediately that the officers’ deaths would cause some backlash. But the call for a protest suspension surprised her.

“Once we were asked to cease our protests, that was affirmation that we could not cease,” said Ms. Yates, 29, who lives in St. Louis but joined protests in New York after the Staten Island grand jury declined to charge a police officer in Mr. Garner’s case.

“They’re telling us that our grief doesn’t matter,” she said.

For some who share the protesters’ concerns, the insistence on pressing on in spite of the funerals is damaging.

“I don’t think the protesters do themselves a favor by protesting until after these officers are laid to rest,” said Ruben Diaz Jr., the Bronx borough president.

Mr. Diaz, echoing some other elected leaders, said the groups were costing themselves support with their disruptive tactics. “They’re losing favor with a lot of New Yorkers,” he said.

Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University professor who studies protest movements, said the strongest ones can survive a lot of animosity and adversity.

“In the antiwar movement, too, there was a lot of bad publicity given people burning draft cards and burning flags,” Professor Kazin said. “But the movement went on and was successful in convincing the public that we needed to get out of Vietnam.”

Obstacles, he said, are inevitable. “In some ways, the test of a successful movement is how you respond. You have to expect that there will be moments like this in a movement. If you don’t, you’re naïve and you don’t know what you got yourself into,” he said.

Just how dramatic the turnabout has been in New York could be measured by a scene that unfolded this week at City Hall. There were no Council members blocking traffic. There were no choruses of “I can’t breathe.” And there were no mayoral meetings with protesters.

Instead, there was unstinting praise for the police from the Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, who earlier this month had asked her colleagues to repeat “I can’t breathe” 11 times, for the number of times Mr. Garner said those words before he died in the encounter with the police.

“We are here to send a simple and direct message: that we unequivocally support, appreciate and value our police officers, that we condemn any and all violence against them, that we must end hateful and divisive rhetoric which seeks to demonize officers and their work,” Ms. Mark-Viverito, flanked by fellow Council members, said at a news conference.