PostedJanuary 28, 2022, 8:44 PM
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On New York’s 5th Avenue, crowded for nearly 20 blocks, a huge crowd paid tribute on Friday to a police officer killed a week earlier. The mayor called him a “hero”.
The coffin of Jason Rivera, killed at the age of 22, is carried out of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan.
–AFP
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–Thousands of people, the vast majority of whom were police officers in blue or black uniforms, gathered for three hours in front of and around the New York cathedral.
–AFP
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New York paid an impressive tribute on Friday to one of the two young police officers killed a week ago in an exchange of fire in Harlem, a symbol of the rise in crime in the megalopolis that its new mayor, Eric Adams, wants to curb with a more repressive policy.
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Thousands of people, the vast majority of whom were police officers in blue or black uniforms, gathered for three hours in front of and around Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, on Manhattan’s 5th Avenue, under gray, sad skies and rain. freezing.
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“A hero”
Inside the cathedral, addressing hundreds of officials, relatives and police during a mass in English and Spanish for 22-year-old Jason Rivera, Mayor Eric Adams praised the memory of the deceased. “Your brother was a hero”, launched this former African-American captain of the New York police (NYPD), in a very heavy atmosphere.
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The policeman’s young widow Dominique, just married, her voice choked with ‘pain and grief’, replied: ‘That’s exactly how he would have liked to be remembered: as a true hero .”
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Jason Rivera was killed on January 21 by the shooting of a violent 47-year-old man in an apartment building in Harlem, after the latter’s mother called the police. The shooter died of his injuries on Monday, while the second young policeman who intervenedWilbert Mora, 27, died on Tuesday.
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Restored Special Units
In total, since January 1, five police officers – including the two killed in Harlem – have been hit by firearms in the megalopolis of nearly nine million inhabitants, Eric Adams recalled last week. , elected from the right wing of the Democratic Party who arrived at the town hall of New York a month ago, on promises to fight against insecurity.
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He is committed to more repression against the proliferation of firearms, particularly illegal ones: he announced on Monday the re-establishment of plainclothes police patrols, “anti-crime units” renamed “anti-firearms units” which had been deleted in 2020, by former mayor Bill de Blasio, after the death of African-American George Floyd, killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. These agents were feared, when Michael Bloomberg was mayor (2002-2013), for their controversial searches of young Blacks and Hispanics suspected of carrying weapons.
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Injured in a hospital
In addition to attacks on police officers, New York is facing a series of violent acts that are causing a stir at the start of the year. On January 14, in Harlem, a 19-year-old Puerto Rican woman was shot dead by a robber in the fast food restaurant where she worked. The next day, a 40-year-old Asian woman was killed by a mentally ill homeless man who pushed her onto a subway track as a train entered Times Square station. And on Tuesday, a man was injured by a gun in the emergency room of a hospital in the Bronx. According to the police, two suspects fled and the victim is not in danger of death.
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(AFP)
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