Angry NY Cops Turn Back on Mayor de Blasio

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Sunday ordered flags flown at half staff around the city, hours after the city's main police union harshly criticized the city's first Democratic mayor in two decades for being insufficiently supportive of the department during recent waves of anti-police violence.

The killings of New York City Police Department officers, Rafael Ramos, 40, and Wenjian Liu, 32, revealed bitter anger among some police toward de Blasio, who they see as not being supportive in the face of public anger.

Several officers turned their backs on de Blasio when he arrived at the Brooklyn hospital where the two officers were taken after they were shot, video showed.

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Patrick Lynch, head of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the country's largest municipal police union, said, "There's blood on many hands tonight ... That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor."

The gunman shot the two police officers in what officials called an "assassination", hours after warning on social media that he planned an attack in retribution for recent U.S. police killings of unarmed black men.

The shooter, 28-year-old Ismaaiyl Abdula Brinsley, traveled from Baltimore, where police said he had shot and wounded his girlfriend, to New York and during the day posted on the social media service Instagram that he would be "putting wings on pigs today," using an anti-police slur.

Brinsley fled to a nearby subway station where he shot himself in the head and died.

The attack, the first fatal shooting of an NYPD officer since 2011, follows weeks of sometimes violent protests around the United States over a pair of incidents in which white police officers shot and killed unarmed black men. In July, a police officer in New York's Staten Island borough killed Eric Garner, a father of six, while trying to arrest him for illegally selling cigarettes.

President Barack Obama condemned the killings, saying "two brave men won't be going home to their loved ones tonight." Attorney General Eric Holder promised the support of the Justice Department throughout the investigation.