BLUE BLOOD
Cops attacked by Occupy protesters
Anti-cop protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge attacked officers trying to make an arrest yesterday, with one bashing the cops with a cane. It’s the latest in a growing number of incidents of crowds heckling or interfering with the NYPD.
NYPD officers were bloodied and battered by anti-cop activists on the Brooklyn Bridge on Wednesday — as Mayor de Blasio continued to exclude cops from his ambitious plan to stem the violence plaguing the city.
Surveillance video shows an unidentified man on the bridge’s walkway leaning over a fence and using a cane to whack cops over the heads as they arrested a counterdemonstrator against a “unity” march on the roadway.
Photos posted on the NYPD’s Twitter account show the wounded cops with blood streaming from their scalps and over their faces.
“The officers sustained serious injuries. This is not peaceful protest, this will not be tolerated,” the department wrote.
Chief of Department Terence Monahan — the NYPD’s highestranking uniformed officer — suffered a broken finger during the clashes on the bridge, sources said.
Video shows Monahan climbing the fence to trade blows with an anti-cop activist during a wild brawl on the walkway between counterdemonstrators and uniformed bicycle cops.
An organizer of the march across the bridge, Tony Herbert, said the group — which included a contingent from the Sergeants Benevolent Association — was heading from Manhattan to Brooklyn when anti-cop activists “jumped off the walk onto the roadway” at about 11 a.m.
“They said they did it peacefully. How do you do it peacefully when you have somebody swinging a cane?” Herbert said.
The NYPD said 37 people were arrested, but details weren’t immediately available.
Meanwhile, de Blasio offered an update on his so-far ineffective plan to stem the city’s surge in shootings — without including any NYPD officials in his briefing for at least the third time in recent days.
De Blasio said the “central Brooklyn violence prevention plan” was developed by Police Commissioner Dermot Shea, but that the city’s top cop was intentionally excluded from the announcement.
“This is a purposeful effort on my part to show the people of New York City there are so many community leaders, so many organizations out there doing this work,” he said.
NYPD statistics show that gun arrests have plunged 67 percent over the past 28 days, following the June 15 disbanding of the department’s undercover anti-crime unit.
There were 10 shootings on Tuesday and another early Wednesday that left a 30-year-old man dead and five others injured in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.
The borough was also the scene of a shooting that killed a 1-yearold boy in Bedford-Stuyvesant late Sunday.
“This weekend in Brooklyn, we’ll be taking action to stop the violence,” de Blasio said.
Later Wednesday, the mayor signed a series of police-reform bills in The Bronx after helping paint “BLACK LIVES MATTER” on Morris Avenue between East 161st and 162nd streets.
The new laws include a ban on chokeholds that also makes it a crime to restrict a person’s ability to breathe, including by sitting, kneeling or standing on someone’s chest or back.
Last week, Monahan called the latter “diaphragm” provisions “dangerous,” saying that “any cop who’s ever fought with someone on the street, trying to get him into cuffs, there’s a great possibility that your knee is going to end up on that individual’s back, and now this new law is criminalizing it.”
De Blasio acknowledged the new laws might make it harder for cops to do their jobs, but said he signed them because people “need to be safe. They want to work with the NYPD and they want respect in turn.”