Cohen: Cop killings show need for common ground

When Ismaaiyl Brinsley approached a police car Saturday in Brooklyn, what he saw was two cops, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, and he killed them both. Ramos was of Dominican descent and Liu was Asian, but to Brinsley they were probably seen as white, which was the color of the cop in Ferguson, Mo., who killed Michael Brown, and the one on Staten Island who killed Eric Garner. Brinsley wanted, he said, “2 of theirs” for “1 of ours.” Blue is the new white.

To this tragedy has to be added paradox. The police are working class. In New York, the protesters who insulted them and, at least once, attacked them did so in the name of racial injustice and economic misery. There is nothing particularly new in any of this. Industrialists used working-class strike breakers to beat up union organizers. The old union anthem is mocked. Solidarity has never been forever.

Now, however, we are no longer talking class. We are talking race. I wonder if things would have turned out differently on Staten Island if Garner had been white. Would the cops have reacted differently to a white man suspected of selling untaxed loose cigarettes? If he resisted arrest, would they simply have walked away? Not likely. Would a grand jury have indicted the officer had the victim been white? Again, not likely. Prosecutors almost never indict cops.

Still, these events have become racially charged. This is understandable. Clearly, the black community in New York felt under siege by the police. The city’s stop-and-frisk policy produced an astounding number of confrontations - 685,724 in 2011. It all seemed wholly unnecessary. New York’s homicide rate had already plummeted. Where New York once accounted for almost 10 percent of the nation’s murders, it’s now down to 2.4 percent - a homicide rate lower than the nation’s as a whole.

Mayor Bill de Blasio empathized with the anger and frustration in the black and Hispanic communities. He used stop-and-frisk as a campaign issue. For some, including many cops, he came across as anti-police, and he further exacerbated that image by embracing Al Sharpton, a longtime police critic. He even had Sharpton on one side of him and Police Commissioner William Bratton on the other at a news conference following the death of Garner. To the cops, it was a poke in the eye. For de Blasio, it was a mistake.

But that mistake has been compounded by the head of the largest police officers’ union, Patrick Lynch. The union and its members have done nothing to cool passions. On the contrary, when de Blasio used the modifier “allegedly” in referring to the pummeling of two cops on the Brooklyn Bridge, the union jumped all over him. The word, though, is mere boilerplate. It comes easy to the tongues of politicians and journalists. It has lost all meaning.

Similarly, when de Blasio cited his concern for his own son, Dante, as a young black man who may have to deal with the police, the mayor was again vilified: How dare he suggest that the cops are biased? This, too, was a bum rap. He was not saying the cops are bigots. He was saying that young black men are more likely to be stopped and roughly handled than young white ones. This was a father speaking.

After the killing of officers Liu and Ramos, de Blasio and Bratton went to the hospital where the two men were taken. The cops there turned their backs on them. Earlier, the union had circulated a letter that enabled officers to bar the mayor from attending their funeral in the event of their death in the line of duty. Both actions showed not only a lack of respect for the mayor but an ugly contempt.

I like cops. I also fear them. They carry guns and they can throw their weight around. I got solidly smacked by a cop as a kid. Everyone has a story about an abusive traffic cop. I supported stop-and-frisk, but I now can see that it went too far. I have never forgiven Sharpton for falsely accusing a prosecutor in 1987 of raping Tawana Brawley - and then refusing to apologize. But I recognize him as someone with a genuine feel for the black community.

I want common ground here. I want the protesters to get off the backs of the cops. I want the cops to put themselves in de Blasio’s shoes. I don’t want this to be a black-white issue. Look at Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos. The only color that mattered was blue.

Richard Cohen is a columnist for the Washington Post.