NYC cops turn back on mayor

Photo: The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

US Vice President Joe Biden, center, arrives for funeral services for New York City police officer Rafael Ramos at Christ Tabernacle Church, in the Glendale section of Queens, Saturday, Dec. 27, 2014, in New York.

NEW YORK - Hundreds of officers outside the church where a funeral was held for a policeman killed along with his partner in an ambush shooting turned their backs on the mayor as he spoke during Saturday's service.

The reaction from officers watching Officer Rafael Ramos' funeral on giant TV screens followed comments from police union officials who had said Mayor Bill de Blasio contributed to a climate of mistrust that contributed to the killings of the two New York Police Department officers.

Inside Christ Tabernacle Church in the borough of Queens, however, mourners gave de Blasio polite applause before and after his speech.

The mayor said hearts citywide were aching after the Dec. 20 shootings that left Ramos and his partner, Wenjian Liu, dead.

"All of this city is grieving and grieving for so many reasons," de Blasio said. "But the most personal is that we've lost such a good man, and the family is in such pain."

Police union officials have blamed de Blasio for fostering anti-police sentiment for his support of protesters angry that no charges will be filed in the police deaths of two unarmed black men, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in the New York borough of Staten Island. At a hospital after the officers' slayings, the New York police union's president, Patrick Lynch, and others turned their backs on de Blasio in a sign of disrespect. Lynch said the mayor had "blood on his hands."

Weeks before the shooting, Lynch had suggested that officers sign a petition requesting that the mayor not attend their funerals were they to die in the line of duty.

De Blasio has stood firmly by the police since the shooting, calling on the demonstrators to temporarily halt their protests and praising officers after the police department announced the arrest of a seventh person since the shooting for making threats against police.

De Blasio and Lynch nodded at each other as they exited the church Saturday and lined up to wait for the casket.

The mayor followed Vice-President Joe Biden and Gov. Andrew Cuomo on the roster of speakers eulogizing Ramos on Saturday.

Officers inside and outside the church applauded when Biden called the NYPD the finest in the world.

"When an assassin's bullet targeted two officers, it targeted this city and it touched the soul of an entire nation," the vice-president said.

Cuomo called the daylight shootings of the officers as they sat in their cruiser on a street in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant section "an attack on all of us."

The attack shook the city and put a halt to large-scale local protests criticizing police over a series of high-profile deaths in which white officers killed unarmed black men.

Funeral plans for Ramos' partner, Officer Wenjian Liu, have yet to be announced.