R.I.P. Officer Omar Edwards

Today, funeral services were held here in Bed Stuy for murdered NYPD officer Omar Edwards. Only 25 years old, Edwards was a two-year veteran of the force, a father of two and a newlywed. A reporter from WNYC radio had the opportunity to interview some of Edwards' friends and neighbors:



I have seen hundreds of people, most of them police officers, filling the streets of Bed Stuy for the past few days for Edwards' wake and this morning's funeral services. People are outraged and heartbroken. Many people, including Edwards' father, have expressed sympathy for Andrew Dunton, the officer who fired the fatal shots. Not me. Fuck him.

I have been unable to find a picture of Dunton anywhere, unsurprisingly. If anyone can locate one, please let me know. We need to know what this monster looks like, so that we may protect ourselves from him. Sadly, I find it very unlikely that he will be fired from the department, so we need to know what he looks like so that we may avoid him at all costs. If some of the Bloods or Crips want to take care of him, well, that wouldn't bother me one bit.

While Dunton is currently on desk duty, in cases like this, the offending White officer is typically allowed to return to the streets, with no regard for his lack of ability to show the reasonable judgement required to be a cop. Dunton has had four civilian complained filed against him in his 4.5 years with the NYPD. Two of them were for excessive force. Two of them are as-yet unresolved complaints that were filed in the past year. Only 10% of NYPD officers receive even one complaint in a year.

The Associated Press' Colleen Long wrote a very small minded piece that was widely circulated when the shooting first occurred. It started out as so:

NEW YORK — It's a police officer's nightmare scenario: Confronting someone who appears to be an armed suspect and opening fire, only to discover that person was actually an officer not in uniform

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No, you privileged idiot, you got that all wrong. Here's a revision: It's a Black police officer's nightmare scenario: you are in plainclothes and confronting a suspect, only to discover that a White officer has also responded to the crime and assumes that you, too, are a criminal. If shooting innocent Black men was such a big fear for White cops, then it wouldn't happen so often. They wouldn't be so apt to shoot first, ask questions last.


Five Black NYPD officers have been shot by White officers since 1992. The Department has announced that they are increasing the amount of trainings that help officers make better judgement calls when it comes to people of color. They showed a clip of one of the training videos on the news last night. RIGHT! And the tapes are not new, they showed a clip on the news and they looked mad old. The words on the screen were "looks can be deceiving" as they showed a Black man in "urban wear" with a gun and A POLICE BADGE AROUND HIS NECK! What is deceiving??????? HE HAS HIS BADGE SHOWING! I know that Officer Edwards didn't, but the person who made the video knew that cops are so knee jerk in their reaction to a Black man with a gun that they may overlook something that major. God, help us.

The NYPD and other police departments in areas with large, Black populations need to stop putting so many White cops in our neighborhoods. In particular, White cops who are from the suburbs/from communities very different from the ones they serve. Most of the White people who play important roles in Black communities, from the teachers to the cops to the store owners, have had little experience with Black people before and outside of their professional lives. This is a recipe for disaster that we have seen play out far too many times. We must gain control of our neighborhoods and make sure that we are adequately represented on the police force.

But how can we ask our people to sign up for the police force when things like this happen?