Two New York City police officers were shot and wounded at around 10:30 pm last night while responding to a call about a robbery in the Bronx, the Associated Press reported.
The officers, who were coming off their shift, along with three other plainclothes officers went to the grocery near East 184th Street in the Tremont section where the shooting occurred.
“They went above and beyond the call to protect their fellow New Yorkers. Thank God the officers are doing well and will recover,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at the hospital where the two officers, who are both listed in stable conditions, are recovering.
According to the AP, Police Commissioner William Bratton said the officers, who were working as part of an anti-crime unit, were in a car and saw the two suspects from the grocery store robbery at a Chinese restaurant – one inside, one standing outside.
Bratton said when they got out of the car, the suspect inside the restaurant fired at the officers, who fired back. The suspects “carjacked a white Camaro,” which was later recovered, abandoned, with a revolver found nearby. It is believed that one of the suspects was also shot and wounded during the shooting.
Police do have video from the incident which they are reviewing, hoping to identify the suspects. Citizens Outraged at Police Being Shot (COP SHOT) is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the suspects’ arrest and conviction.
This latest incident, while not particularly in the same vein, comes about two weeks after NYPD Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were killed in their patrol car in an ambush-style attack by a man on an anti-cop rampage. The shooter then ran to the subway and shot and killed himself.
Tensions between the NYPD and Mayor de Blasio have been high since he admitted that he had cautioned his bi-racial son on how to handle dealings with the cops. Many members of the NYPD saw took this to mean that de Blasio is anti-cop, and turned their backs on him when he spoke at both Ramos and Liu’s funerals.
Yesterday, at a press conference, de Blasio did not apologize for those remarks, but cited NYPD stats for his first year as mayor to prove that his vision for a “safer city, a fairer city,” is in fact working.
With Commissioner Bratton by his side, de Blasio announced that that overall major crimes were down more than four-and-a-half percent in 2014, along with “the lowest number of homicides since the modern policing era began in 1993,” PIX 11 News reported.
de Blasio also said there were 2,600 fewer robberies last year, subway crime was down 15 percent, and that there was an 11 percent drop in civilian complaints against the NYPD.
