Tuesday, January 06, 2015

Two Plainclothes Officers Are Shot in the Bronx
By AL BAKER and J. DAVID GOODMAN
New York Times
JAN. 5, 2015

Two plainclothes New York City police officers were shot in the Bronx on Monday night after they attempted to stop a car while responding to a robbery, the police said.

One officer was shot in the back and another officer was shot in the arm, police officials said. Their injuries were not considered life-threatening.

A search was underway for at least two assailants, Deputy Chief Kim Y. Royster, a Police Department spokeswoman, said. A gun was recovered a block from one crash scene, officials said, but it was not immediately clear if it belonged to either of the assailants.

Chief Royster said that the officers were not targeted by the gunman — as occurred in the Dec. 20 fatal shooting of two officers in their patrol car in Brooklyn — but instead appeared to have been investigating a robbery when the shooting began.

“This is something that they came upon,” she said.

A news conference was expected at St. Barnabas Hospital, where the officers were taken, Chief Royster said.

The shootings occurred around 10:30 p.m. near East 184th Street and Tiebout Avenue, near the Grand Concourse and south of Fordham University, the police said.

William J. Bratton, the police commissioner, entered the emergency room shortly after 11:30 p.m. and was guided to an area in the back. The trauma bay in the emergency room was filled with police officers.

Around 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s motorcade drove up to a hospital entrance clogged with police cars. Two officers guarding the entrance silently waved the mayor in.

Soon after, an officer posted a sign advertising a $10,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of someone who shoots an officer. City Councilman Ritchie Torres, who represents the neighborhood, and more Police Department officials also arrived at the hospital.

The two officers who were shot were working in plainclothes as part of an anti-crime detail in the 46th Precinct, a police official said. In the moments before the shooting, they were trying to stop a car, the official said.

“They were attempting to pull a car over,” the official said. “The car fled.”

At least one of the assailants got out of the car and “fired at the cops,” the official said. In an ensuing shootout, one of the assailants might have been injured, another official said. One of the two assailants then carjacked a white Camaro and then crashed it into a fence near Park and 189th Street, another official said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to talk to the news media.

Just after midnight, Mr. Torres released a statement saying that the officers were shot in the line of duty while preventing an armed robbery. He asked New Yorkers to keep the officers and their families in their prayers.

“Tonight’s shooting underscores, in the most painfully human terms, the extraordinary risk that officers take in keeping our neighborhoods safe from violent crime,” Mr. Torres said. “The two criminals responsible for the shootings deserve no mercy at all: They should be swiftly apprehended and prosecuted aggressively to the fullest extent of the law.”

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