Jonathan Diller of the NYPD was shot by a career criminal with 21 arrests to his name:
Diller, who left behind a wife and infant son, was shot to death by a recidivist; that is, a repeat criminal.
But this was no ordinary recidivist. In the old days, that might have meant someone who had, at the very least, spent some time in prison. Under the new rules, though, Diller’s killer, whom I will not give the dignity of naming, had an endless history of previous arrests…21 in total at last word. Nor were these inconsequential arrests for things such as jaywalking or graffiti. Instead, the killer, who was arrested with a gun in his hand and shiv carefully stowed in his rectum, was arrested for violent crimes.
In a sane society, the killer would have been in prison until he was dead or too old to commit crimes. But thanks to the demons unleashed on society by the BLM movement, the killer—a black man with a Hispanic name—was out on the streets and armed. For leftists, his race meant he was society’s victim, no matter the carnage he deliberately rained down upon those caught in his path.
Meanwhile, Trump attended ceremonies for Diller on the same day that a trio of Democrat presidential luminaries – Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama – held a fancy fundraiser in New York that raised twenty-six million dollars for Biden’s re-election:
The mood at Radio City Music Hall was electric as Obama praised Biden’s willingness to look for common ground and said, “That’s the kind of president I want.” Clinton said simply of the choices facing voters in 2024: “Stay with what works.”
Biden himself went straight at Donald Trump, saying his expected GOP rival’s ideas were “a little old and out of shape.”
Har de har har har.
And way way down towards the end of the article it mentions:
Trump was in the New York area on Thursday, attending the Long Island wake of a New York City police officer who was shot and killed during a traffic stop in Queens.
Here is the eulogy for Diller delivered by his young widow. It is an eloquent and heartrending tribute to a man who sounds as though he was a wonderful person to know and an even more wonderful person to have as a husband and father. Tragically, his one-year-old son will never know him, although he no doubt will hear about him.
It puts me in mind of other assassinations of police officers throughout my lifetime, in particular the cold-blooded killings of NYPD officers Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie back in January of 1972. The article is long; here are some excerpts:
For someone who came of age during the height of youth culture, Greg [Foster] didn’t spend much time being young. When he turned 22, that November, he was married, with two kids, and he’d served a tour in Vietnam with the Marines. No matter how many intimidating labels stuck to him—black kid from the South Bronx, cop in the ghetto, battle-scarred jarhead—anyone who knew Greg would have described him as low-key and genial, earnest and modest, maybe a little softhearted, maybe a little square. You wouldn’t have looked at his babyish round face and sleepy eyes and guessed his resume. His wife could have told you that he was too shy to dance. She couldn’t press his uniform shirts to his satisfaction, so he ironed them himself. The squalor of the projects appalled him. He’d grown up poor, too, but his mother would never have let him run the streets dirty and half-dressed, the way kids did there.
To see [Greg Foster] with his partner, Rocco Laurie, was to be put in mind of other contrasts. Greg was short for a cop then, with a spreading waistline, and Rocco was 6’1, just over 200 pounds, a weightlifter and weekend athlete. With his strong, straight features and by-the-book attitude, Rocco must have seemed exotically all-American to people on Avenue B, someone from a picket-fenced village in the heartlands, like Clark Kent. As an Italian from Staten Island, with its old world customs and post-war affluence—a place with color TVs and unlocked doors—Rocco was from far away. He also didn’t spend much time being young. At 23, he was also married, also a Marine, also a combat veteran, also new at the 9th. Rocco and Greg were more alike than not, in temperament and perspective. Neither man’s wife was crazy about their career choices, but Greg had wanted to be a cop since before he knew when, and Rocco took the test after he decided that college wasn’t for him. Still, the now-familiar movie trope of black and white cop buddies hadn’t been seen much then, on screen or off, and the partners were eye-catching, even in a neighborhood where the street life was a carnival that never left town.
They were shot in the back while walking the beat one evening; the perps were members of something called the Black Liberation Army. But they weren’t just shot in the back:
Three Black males walked toward them. One of them wore a long black coat and another a green fatigue jacket and black Australian-style bush hat, according to an insert from “Days of Rage,” a 2015 book authored by Bryan Burrough.
After passing Laurie and Foster, the men turned and unloaded multiple rounds into their backs.
Laurie was shot a total of six times in the limbs, neck and groin. Foster was hit eight times, including three direct shots to his eyes. One of the killers — apparently caught up in the moment — danced over the bodies while firing shots into the air. Two of the perpetrators removed the officers’ guns, one of which would later be recovered after a shootout with police in St. Louis.
Foster left a young wife and two children. Laurie left a pregnant wife who later miscarried and has never remarried in all the long years since. She is still a beautiful woman. You can see her in this photo (I can’t embed and copy it, so you’ll have to follow the link), taken in 2022 at a 50th-anniversary remembrance when by my calculations she would have been in her early 70s.
RIP Jonathan Diller, Gregory Foster, Rocco Laurie, and all the other officers murdered in the line of duty.
