The president meets the new mayor in New York as the city buries its second police officer in a week.
President Biden will meet with New York City Mayor Eric Adams Thursday, in a belated acknowledgment of the violent crime surge that began with the George Floyd riots of 2020. Mr. Biden arrives in New York following the second funeral for a policeman in less than a week. Officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora were responding to a domestic-violence call at a Harlem apartment on Jan. 21. A man emerged from a bedroom, shooting, and continued to shoot Rivera and Mora as they lay on the ground, in what a police source calls an “execution.” Rivera, 22, died at the scene; Mora, 27, a bullet lodged in his brain, was taken off life support four days later.
Such ambush attacks on officers were up 115% nationwide in 2021, the National Fraternal Order of Police reported. All told, 73 officers were intentionally killed in 2021, the highest number since 1995 (apart from the 9/11 attacks) and at least a 56% increase over 2020. This January’s casualties included a Houston-area corporal gunned down during a car stop before he even got out of his cruiser; a St. Louis officer who had been following a car connected to a homicide and who was critically shot in the abdomen; a Milwaukee County deputy shot seven times by a suspect fleeing a car stop; and three Houston officers shot during a vehicle pursuit. On Dec. 16 in Baltimore, Officer Keona Holley was assassinated with two bullets to the head while sitting alone in her patrol car at 1.30 a.m.
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of the bestselling War on Cops and The Diversity Delusion. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal