Chapter 1 The Assassination of Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu On Saturday, December 20, 2014, Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley woke up in Baltimore and thought about killing himself. He''d been arrested twenty times, his friends had robbed and pistol-whipped him, and his girlfriend had dumped him. He still had her key, so at approximately 5:30 that morning he went to her house and put a silver Taurus 9mm pistol to his head. After she talked him out of it, he shot her in the gut and ran. Now what? Brinsley could imagine the word on the street: he was a loser who couldn''t even do suicide right and didn''t have the balls to kill his girlfriend; he''d only wounded her. He decided to go back to Brooklyn, where he was raised. Counting my time as a military police officer in Vietnam, I''ve been in the law enforcement business for nearly fifty years, and this kind of story is less unusual than you''d imagine. In fact, it is kind of typical.
Police see a lot of men and women who have put themselves in difficult positions try to change the narrative of their life stories to transform themselves into heroes. That morning, Ismaaiyl Brinsley was a bum who was going to be sought by the law for brutalizing an innocent woman. He was going to jail. So he decided he was going to kill some cops. That July, Eric Garner had died while struggling with New York Police Department officers, and that August, Michael Brown had been killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. That November and December, grand juries had handed down "no true bills," declining to indict the officers involved in either death. In the midst of all this, the Black Lives Matter movement rose to the fore. It had first appeared as a hashtag in the social media world associated with the trial and acquittal of George Zimmerman in the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin and then in the physical world in 2014 with a convergence of activists in Ferguson.
Now the movement was being felt nationwide, driven in part by a roiling resentment of the police in the African American and other communities throughout the country. Throughout New York City, every day there were daunting demonstrations--large, small, medium size--at which people were yelling at the police. Demonstrators were screaming right up in cops'' faces: All police are brutal, you are murderers, you are racists! I know from a lifetime of police work that this is not true, but the perception had taken hold. The anger was real, though, even if the claims were not. For some demonstrators, the shouts were meant to provoke officers to prove the protesters'' points. Our men and women exhibited enormous restraint, first, in taking the face-to-face verbal, personal abuse, and second, in working hard to facilitate people''s protests, by following them through the streets, blocking traffic so they could maintain their groups, setting aside appropriate sites, and making sure that demonstrators were safe while demonstrating. This is, after all, America, where the right to protest is protected by our Constitution. All assumptions to the contrary, the police work hard to make sure free-speech demonstrations happen, and happen successfully.
In cities large and small, officers maintain the peace for every kind of protest imaginable. These were different: the police were the focus, not just the peacekeepers, and they were being baited at every turn. (Not until the summer of 2020 would officers see anything like this again.) The internet traffic was all about "killer cops," "cops need to pay," "cops should be killed." The rules against advocating violence had apparently gone out the window. Our Threat Assessment and Protection Unit--TAPU--was getting buried in internet incitements to harm, assault, or kill police. They were almost overwhelmed by running these threats down. Furthermore, unlike a one-day march for nuclear nonproliferation, say, these protests were nonstop and snowballed through the fall and early winter.
With this as the backdrop, Brinsley decided to make himself into an avenger. He had stolen his ex-girlfriend''s cell phone. He logged into his Instagram account. Alongside a photo of that same silver Taurus 9mm handgun he posted the message: "I''m Putting Wings On Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours . Let''s Take 2 Of Theirs #ShootThePolice #RIPErivGarner [sic] #RIPMikeBrown." While on the bus, Brinsley called his girlfriend''s mother. She recognized the number, and thinking it was her child, picked up.
Brinsley apologized for shooting her daughter. She called the Baltimore County Police. "He is on Instagram, he called me and said something, I don''t remember, like ''I''m sorry'' or ''I didn''t mean to do it'' or whatever it was." The Baltimore County Police pinged the phone. They saw it was moving slowly northward in the direction of New York. Was Brinsley on a bus? In a car? On a train? They couldn''t be sure, only that he was moving. Investigators found he had a prior address in Brooklyn; maybe he was heading there. They telephoned what they thought was the Brooklyn precinct in which that address was located.
"What? Where?" said the sergeant who answered. "Not us." He referred them to the right one. "You have an alert for this guy for attempted homicide and you think he might be headed here?" said the sergeant who answered the phone at the 70th Precinct, or the 7-0, as cops call it. "Fax us what you''ve got." Brinsley arrived in Brooklyn and tossed the phone in the garbage near the Barclays Center. He told some people he ran into in the street to follow him on Instagram. He said, "Watch what I''m going to do.
" Baltimore had made a wanted flyer. It read, "Please use extreme caution. Threats on police." The scan arrived at the 7-0 at 2:46 p.m. At 2:47 Brinsley stood in Bedford-Stuyvesant at the passenger-side window of an NYPD cruiser. Inside were Police Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu. Rafael Ramos had entered the Police Academy at age thirty-seven, more than a decade older than the average starting cop.
He was married, with two sons, and both at work and home Ramos was the picture of a person who cared deeply about the young. He joined the NYPD as a school safety agent and worked his way up to officer. He had been on the force only three years. Ramos was studying to be a chaplain; he was eleven days past his fortieth birthday. Wenjian Liu left his native China when he was twelve years old. He called himself Joe and had been on the path to becoming an accountant when 9/11 changed his thinking. He first joined the NYPD as an auxiliary officer--an unpaid volunteer with no gun, just a uniform and a star-shaped shield. When two of his auxiliary brothers were murdered by a madman in Greenwich Village, he could have turned away.
He could have said it wasn''t worth it. Instead, four months later, he took the oath to become a New York City police officer. Liu often cooked for his immigrant parents--he made a great vegetable soup. He was an avid fisherman. He had just gotten married that October. Liu was thirty-two years old and had been on the job seven years. At almost the same moment the Baltimore wanted flyer came out of the 7-0 precinct''s printer, Brinsley fired four shots through the cruiser''s window, shattering the glass and hitting both Ramos and Liu in the head. The guy who was trying to recast himself as some kind of racial avenger had picked two officers who were part of the growing number of minority officers in the NYPD.
Two Con Ed workers who were stopped at a red light witnessed the shooting. They called 911 and followed Brinsley and tried to confront him, but he turned the weapon on them. "You want some of this?" They backed off, but after they saw him go down into the Myrtle-Willoughby Avenues G train subway station, they flagged down a patrol car and told the cops where to find him. In hot pursuit, the officers cornered Brinsley on the platform. He shot himself in the head and died. Ramos and Liu were rushed to the closest hospital, Woodhull, and into the emergency room. My wife, Rikki Klieman, and I had gone home for the holidays to Boston, where I was born. Normally I would have had my security detail run me up there and back.
But because it was Christmas and the wife of Detective Rahkim Fareaux, a member of my detail, was close to giving birth, I had opted to drive a department car myself; at least if something were to happen in the middle of the night and planes and trains weren''t running, I would have the means to get back. We were in our hotel when my BlackBerry went off. It was Mayor Bill de Blasio. "We have two cops shot in Brooklyn." I immediately called the head of my detail, Inspector Tim Trainor, who had also been trying to reach me. It was now their job to help get me back. I rode the red light and siren from Boston and was surprised that people were yielding on the expressway. (Boston is worse than New York about people not getting out of the way of emergency vehicles.
) I was working the phones, trying to get the details on the condition of the officers and find the quickest way to get to New York. At the Rhode Island state line I was greeted with a police escort to Green Airport in Warwick, where an NYPD helicopter was waiting. The emotion and anxiety were high--one of the most terrible parts of the NYPD commissioner''s job is dealing with the death of officers under one''s command. But at the same time, I was trying to project a degree of calm, even over the phone, that would reassure the people of the department that they were in good hands and that we would move forward with clear purpose. When cops get shot, as police commissioner you always have the same reaction: you''re deeply concerned for their safety--How badly are they injured? Is it debilitating? Life threatening?--because often you don''t know. But yo.