Pei Xia Chen remembers her officer husband’s gruesome execution on a New York street by an anti-police vigilante every day, even though it has been ten years.
On December 20, 2014, NYPD officers Wenjian Liu, 32, and Rafael Ramos, 40, were killed in a deliberate assassination that rocked America.
The gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, approached the patrol car’s passenger-side window in Brooklyn and fired several shots into the officers’ heads and upper bodies before fleeing to a nearby subway station and turning the pistol on himself.
Brinsley had stated on social media that he intended to kill police officers in retaliation for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two black men killed by police that year.
“I am putting wings on pigs today…They took one of ours…He wrote, “Let’s Take Two of Theirs.”
The horrifying double murder heightened tensions that had been simmering throughout the year over charges of police brutality and racism.
Six years before the Black Lives Matter rallies, which were inspired by George Floyd’s killing, activists from the newly founded racial justice organization took to the streets in cities throughout the country with signs reading “I can’t breathe”.
The statement mimicked the last words of Eric Garner, an unarmed man killed on July 17, 2014, after being put in a chokehold by an NYPD officer.
In a worrisome foreshadowing of what was to come, a viral film shot in the weeks preceding the NYPD officers’ deaths shows New York demonstrators chanting: “What do we want?” Dead cops! When do we want it?. Now!”
The protests highlighted issues about police violence, which are still being contested today.
But a decade after her husband Wenjian’s murder, Ms Chen has warned that violence against police officers is still being disregarded.
The New York Post reports that assaults on NYPD officers have increased by nearly 60% since 2019, from 1,253 to 1,975.
According to Patrick Hendry, President of the Police Benevolent Association, people “think they can take a swing at a cop and get away with it, because they believe the justice system is on their side”.
Ms Chen stated, “While trying to keep society safe from dangerous criminals, police officers can be spat on, smacked, punched, stabbed, shot, and, unfortunately, quite often killed, simply for doing their job.”
“My husband and his partner were slain just because they wore blue uniforms. This is the reality that police officers face every day when they choose to protect society.”
Ms Chen was at her mother’s house when she heard a knock on the door at 4 p.m. on the day her husband was killed.
An officer informed her that her husband had been gravely hurt, and they rushed to the hospital in a police cruiser.
When she arrived, she noticed “hundreds” of officers lining the hospital’s hallways and became concerned.
“I thought, ‘oh my God, there must be something wrong,'” she confessed.
“When they led me into the room, I saw him. He was lying there, covered in the white blanket, when they told me he was gone.
Liu and Ramos’ funeral was the largest police funeral in New York history, with over 100,000 people in attendance, including then-Vice President Joe Biden.
Mr. Biden offered a eulogy, saying: “When an assassin’s bullet targeted two officers, it also targeted this city and touched the soul of the entire nation.”
The murders of Liu and Ramos halted weeks of rallies in New York, but fury was directed at Mayor Bill de Blasio, whom police union officials accused of having “blood on his hands.”
When the embattled mayor delivered a eulogy expressing his sympathies to the NYPD, hundreds of cops turned their backs.
Ms Chen, in her own address, characterized her husband as her “best friend” and “hero,” whose parents were “his everything”.
Reflecting on her memories of that day, the mother of one recalls the city being whipped up into a frenzy in the run-up to her husband’s murder.
“The media and the politicians, they create all this,” she was saying. “They lead people to assume that the police are horrible people, which they are not. They’re just ordinary people who were slaughtered for no reason.
“Law enforcement should be respected and supported.”