I was sitting at an outdoor restaurant in the west village (7th and Bleeker) earlier this evening having dinner with my mom when the woman at the table next to ours said this to her dinner companion. My mom looked at me and said in disgust in Bengali, “Do people get any stupider than her?”. I nodded in agreement.

In the previous ten minutes we had witnessed at least thirty cop cars – both marked and unmarked (not exaggerating), a mobile command center, three news vans, and four paramedics blaze by on Bleeker street behind us. We could see/hear two helicopters flying around above us as well. The lady made her proclamation just as a police van stopped at the intersection and closed off Bleeker street to all non-emergency vehicles.

For the rest of the meal (another forty minutes or so) at least one emergency vehicle of some sort would pass by every two or three minutes. One helicopter would complete it’s rotation about every five minutes while the other stayed hovering in one place.

I’m sure in the back of the minds of all of us sitting there at that restaurant (except perhaps that lady) was… “Was there a terrorist attack or something?”. I’ve never seen anywhere near that many emergency vehicles go by at the same time and direction like that. I kept refreshing the news sites on my phone in hopes to find out what was going on.

I was also text messaging with Son during all this and he too saw a swarm of cop cars going towards the village from where he was hanging out in the lower east side.

We later found out that one civilian and two auxiliary (volunteer/unarmed) police officers had been shot and killed by a guy with a semi-automatic handgun three blocks from where my mom and I were eating.

[...I remember being handed recruitment flyer's by the auxiliary police department when I first moved here. I would joke around with Angela about how "...even I could do it". Now I wonder... The point however is that these two auxiliary officers who died were just ordinary folks with regular day jobs trying to be involved in protecting their communities. (Not that it's any more okay for a real police officer to die either)... But they went into the situation without even having guns to protect themselves with...]

What I still can’t comprehend, and pisses me off to no avail is (I’m gonna rant now): Who the fuck gets pissed off at cops for responding to an emergency?! I mean it’s not even like a police van just pulled up and blocked an intersection for no reason (and they still have the right to do that!). The only thing you could hear and see were the sirens and their flashing red lights… Obviously something was going down. Just cuz her skank ass wasn’t affected by it – she somehow found it her right to be annoyed. Three blocks west and it coulda been her bitch-ass who got shot.

Here’s a link to the full article:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/15/nyc.shootout/index.html
http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=67691
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=local&id=5123346#