Exploited

“This wasn’t at all related to protests, this wasn’t some revolutionary act. This was a senseless murder.”

After the shrill of gunfire filled a Brooklyn street, leaving two police officers dead on Saturday, the clamor of incendiary rhetoric and finger-pointing soon followed.

The police union president linked recent anti-police violence protests to the killings and said Mayor Bill de Blasio had blood on his hands. During a press conference shortly after the shooting deaths, a cadre of police officers literally turned their backs on de Blasio as he arrived, stoking the passions of officers and their supporters who feel the mayor hasn’t stood strongly enough with them.

“There’s blood on many hands tonight,” said Patrick Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association. “That blood on the hands starts on the steps of city hall in the office of the mayor.”

In the aftermath of the shooting of officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, police and their supporters have blamed the overwhelmingly peaceful protest movements sparked by the grand jury decisions in the Michael Brown and Garner cases for spurring Saturday’s killings. As the city mourns what can only be described as the senseless killings of the officers, protesters and protests leaders have decried the loose connection between the protests and the killings as divisive, irresponsible and dangerous.

“We have to put all of this in proper context. What happened Saturday was tragic but completely unconnected to the movement,” Cherrell Brown said, an organizer with Equal Justice U.S.A, who has been active in the umbrella of protests calling for an end to what she described as the “extra-judicial killings” of black people by police. “This wasn’t at all related to protests, this wasn’t some revolutionary act. This was a senseless murder,” she said on the “Melissa Harris-Perry Show” Sunday morning.

Brown followed up with msnbc that “What we need more than anything right now is collective healing, not polarization based on false equivalencies.”

A host of social justice groups have condemned the equivocation between the officers’ deaths and the protests.

Joo-Hyun Kang, director of Communities United for Police Reform, said “there are people who would seek to exploit this tragedy and use it to condemn the growing national moment to end police violence and discriminatory policing.

“Attempts to link [Saturday’s] tragic events with a movement that holds justice, dignity and respect for all as its core values are cheap political punditry, and dangerous in their divisiveness,” Kang said.

A coalition of organizations that have led protests in Ferguson released a joint statement in which they said they were “shocked and saddened” by the killings.

“We mourned with the families of Eric Garner and Mike Brown who experienced unspeakable loss, and similarly our hearts go out to the families of these officers who are now experiencing that same grief. They deserve all of our prayers,” the statement from the coalition, Ferguson Action said.

“Unfortunately, there have been attempts to draw misleading connections between this movement and today’s tragic events. Millions have stood together in acts of non-violent civil disobedience, one of the cornerstones of our democracy,” it continued. “It is irresponsible to draw connections between this movement and the actions of a troubled man who took the lives of these officers and attempted to take the life of his ex-partner, before ultimately taking his own.”

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