Funeral honors slain NYPD Det. Wilbert Mora
Correspondent Bryan Llenas describes the funeral for fallen NYPD Det. Wilbert Mora on 'Special Report.'
There are times when New York grieves as a city, when tragic events permeate the collective consciousness of Gotham and color our daily sojourns and interactions.
The terrible murders of New York Police Department Officers Wilbert Mora and Jason Rivera have been just such an event. The loss of these two brave public servants, both in their 20s, has brought home how deeply unsafe New Yorkers have begun to feel on their streets.
On Wednesday, at his funeral, Mora’s sister asked how many cops have to die "before the system changes?" It is a question on the lips of patrons of coffee houses, riders of subways, and neighbors on stoops.
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The deaths of these officers seem just as wrong, just as much a result of poor leadership as the general condition of the city newly awash in violent crime.
This palpable sense of fear, unthinkable just a few short years ago, was a big reason why former cop Eric Adams beat out a cadre of anti-police progressive candidates to secure the mayor’s office last November. Since then, things have only gotten worse.
Rhetorically, Adams has said many of the right things about bringing back plainclothes anti-crime units, about openness to implementing Stop, Question, and Frisk, about bail reform, and about showing respect and thanks to the NYPD every day. But now that talk has to turn into action, no matter how much the far left may object.
This is exactly the message that Adams needs to send when President Biden visits New York on Thursday in an attempt to show a doubtful nation that the White House takes crime seriously.
This city knows what it takes to combat crime. It takes aggressive and proactive policing, it takes actual jail sentences for violent offenders, and it takes leaders who aren’t afraid to have cops’ backs.
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That recipe made New York one of the safest cities in the world starting with Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s, and it can easily be replicated.
Biden himself was eager to tackle crime at the end of the last century as a leader of the 1994 Crime Bill. Today, he seems like a shell of that friend of the police who bends over backwards to protect a far left that at best wants to defund police and at worst is outright disdainful of them.
It is no longer enough for Biden to ignore those radical voices, he must denounce them.
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The families of the fallen officers, the police themselves, and the people of New York and America demand that our grief at the too-soon loss of such heroes not hang upon us in vain. A vital first step is to announce, without caveat or prevarication, that our leaders stand with the police, and not with the criminals they vie against.
If Joe Biden truly wants a reset and Eric Adams truly wants to turn his city around, the call must clarion, and the actions must follow swiftly. That is the very least that Officers Mora and Rivera deserve.
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