The Patriot Post® · Massive Turnout Honors Fallen NYC Cop

“Although you won’t be here anymore, I want you to live through me.”

So said Dominique Luzuriaga, widow of slain NYPD officer Jason Rivera, to mourners at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. “This system continues to fail us,” she went on. “We are not safe anymore, not even the members of the service. I know you were tired of these laws, especially the ones from the new DA. I hope he’s watching you speak through me right now.”

That new DA she mentions is Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, one of numerous hard-left big-city DAs whose campaigns were funded by billionaire anarcho-socialist George Soros. Bragg ran on a soft-on-crime platform that emphasized decarceration — which is to say, putting fewer bad people behind bars and instead employing “reformist” and “abolitionist” strategies to more gently encourage criminals to change their wicked ways.

Luzuriaga and Rivera, who at 22 is one of the youngest NYPD officers ever killed in the line of duty, had known each other since grade school and had been married less than five months. In the cruelest of fates, they’d had a fight that afternoon when Rivera went to work for the last time. That evening, he and his partner, Wilbert Mora, 27, responded to a domestic violence call and were murdered by a violent career criminal named Lashawn McNeil. Rivera died that night. Mora died last Tuesday, a day after McNeil, who’d been shot by a third officer at the scene.

The turnout for Rivera’s funeral was massive, and it reflected the feelings of a brotherhood under siege in New York City and elsewhere.

#FidelisAdMortem #NYPD #wewillneverforget @NYCMayor @NYPDPC @NYPDChiefOfDept @NYPDCeremonial @NYPDHighway @NYPDInMemoriam @NYCPBA @NYPDnews @NYPDchaplains pic.twitter.com/M4MOaZkIJq

— David H - PBA Director s30 (@DHeskiel) January 28, 2022

As Caroline Downey writes in National Review: “While the religious service was conducted inside the church and broadcasted to the public over speaker, the massive brigade of cops stood outside in the falling snow and freezing weather, paying no mind to the winter storm warning. Badges on their shoulders read ‘Newark, 'Philadelphia,’ ‘Darien,’ ‘Baltimore,’ and the names of many other cities. There was overwhelming solidarity and camaraderie among them, some strangers, many already or soon-to-be friends. Bundled up in the bitter cold, officers exchanged handshakes, embraces, and laughs as they waited to say farewell to someone that easily could have been them had they been assigned to Harlem last Friday.”

Sadly, that show of solidarity wasn’t universal. In a grotesque display of moral equivalence, Harlem city council member Kristin Richardson Jordan, a socialist and an “abolitionist” like DA Bragg, posted: “My deepest condolences to the families of Officer Rivera, Officer Mora and Lashawn McNeil.”

Then there was Christopher Flanigan, a high school math teacher from Brooklyn, who couldn’t resist reflecting on an incident from 2020 in which an NYPD vehicle moved through a crowd of George Floyd protesters — an incident which injured no one but clearly traumatized some social justice warriors. His despicable Instagram post read: “5/30/20: NYPD SUV drives into a crowd of protestors. Ideal conditions for reciprocity.”

In a modest show of fundamental decency, Flanigan’s school, Coney Island Prep, has since fired him. He claims his message was “misconstrued.”

In the end, we should let these isolated bits of awfulness sink in, and then let them go. And we should remember instead that our nation’s police officers have pledged to serve and protect us, and that these two, Rivera and Mora, honored both that pledge and their NYPD motto: fidelis ad mortem, faithful unto death.