Ismaaiyl Brinsley was either a "terribly disturbed young man" drawing attention to himself or a criminal "brainwashed" by relentlessly negative media portrayals of the police — dueling portraits of a cop killer offered by two former big-city police officers on
Newsmax TV on Monday.
Retired Los Angeles Police Department Sgt. Cheryl Dorsey and retired New York City Police Department Det. Sgt. Joe Giacalone joined "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner to discuss the causes and aftermath of Brinsley's violent act — the execution-style slayings of two NYPD officers on Saturday in Brooklyn.
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Brinsley used an Instagram account beforehand to announce that he planned to kill police officers in New York as payback for the death of NYPD chokehold victim
Eric Garner — a central figure in mass protests over policing that have multiplied in New York and other U.S. cities.
But LAPD veteran Dorsey said Brinsley's connection to the protest movement was circumstantial at most.
She emphasized the
emerging picture of the killer: an outcast with a history of arrests and mental illness, and a near-stranger to his family in recent years who shot an ex-girlfriend in one city on Saturday, traveled to another in order to target cops, and finally turned his gun on himself.
"I don't believe that this had much to do [with] the protest," said Dorsey. "Rather, this terribly disturbed young man was trying to make a point, and it's unfortunate that he did it by using these officers as a vehicle to draw attention to himself."
NYPD veteran Giacalone, however, said that a drumbeat of negative press for police departments in the wake of Garner's death, and those of others, in the past several months helped create a climate of hostility toward law enforcement.
He described the media as "day in and day out, basically painting the police as bad guys."
"There's a lot of people in society who are already criminals, and they keep on hearing this day in and day out, and they're brainwashed even further," said Giacalone. "And then they take it upon themselves to act."
He said the shootings could affect everyday policing and cause slower response times for emergency calls, as officers in New York and elsewhere become more cautious in their patrols.
Giacalone said officers will feel the need "to take a step back and make sure that they are not walking into a trap or an ambush — something similar to what we saw in the '70s and '80s with the Black Liberation Army, where they were executing cops on fake radio runs."
Dorsey said that even under duress, police "are professionals, and so they're going to do their job, and they're going to do it in a matter that's safe for them and in a manner that's safe for the public."
But she acknowledged that "they just need to be more vigilant and more diligent in the way that they perform their duties day-to-day now because of what's going on."
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