NYC cop killer took part in recent anti-police protests says fellow rap group member-UK Daily Mail. Update: AP says shooter went to anti-police protest in NYC, took video of it, but "didn't participate"

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Updates at end of this post.
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"Brinsley took part in the recent anti-police protests....‘He posted motivational stuff on Instagram and went to the protests.'"

12/20/14, "Two New York policemen executed in broad daylight by man who shot his girlfriend before bragging on Instagram that he was going to get revenge for deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown," UK Daily Mail, by Mia De Graaf, Kieran Corcoran

"One of (Ismaaiyl Abdullah) Brinsley's friends, Awk Smith, spoke to DailyMail.com in Brooklyn - feet away from the crime scene - to describe how Brinsley had been 'acting strange' in the wake of the Eric Garner grand jury trial.

Father-of-six Garner was killed by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, who arrested him for selling loose cigarettes on the street, then held him in a fatal chokehold. The killing provoked global outrage, sparked violent protests across the US, and exposed severe racial divisions in New York City. 

Mr Smith, who was a member of rap outfit P.Y. Gang with Brinsley, described their recent practises: 'We all noticed he was acting strange... different, it was kind of like he wasn't there when you spoke to him. He wasn't saying very much and he wasn't performing. He had a different kind of passion.' 

Another member of the group, Paul Yawney, said Brinsley took part in the recent anti-police protests.

Yawney said: ‘He posted motivational stuff on Instagram and went to the protests. I think this really came as a shock to a lot of us. He shot his girlfriend this morning then went to shoot those cops. It's scary to think that's what he was thinking.' 

He arrived at his 29-year-old former girlfriend's house in Baltimore County at around 5am on Saturday morning before shooting her in the abdomen. Detectives are now investigating whether Brinsley was a member of the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF), a large-scale gang in Baltimore that has been responsible for masterminding criminal plots behind bars....

Investigators are also examining Brinsley's Instagram account - which has been suspended from public view - for clues of a motive. According to NBC, Brinsley - who was armed with a semi-automatic pistol bought in Georgia in 1996 - may have been visiting his child, who is based in Brooklyn.  

Many of his posts reference Garner, who died in a police chokehold on Staten Island, sparking widespread outrage when a grand jury later decided not to indict anybody over the death.

A police source speaking to the New York Post said the killings resembled 'an execution' in which the attacker started 'pumping bullets' into the officers. 

Court documents reveal Brinsley's first recorded arrest was on October 1, 2005, for disorderly conduct in Fulton County, Georgia.

On December 23, 2005, he was arrested and charged with shoplifting, also in Fulton County. In July 2006, he was held on a $3,500 (£2,200) bond for carrying a concealed weapon and shoplifting with a knife.

A year later, Brinsley was booked for trespassing. On June 6, 2011, he was arrested in Cobb, Georgia, for 10 offences including criminal damage and carrying a concealed weapon.

And finally, in June last year, he was arrested for violating probation in Cobb, Georgia. According to NYPD Commissioner William Bratton, Brinsley did not appear to have a fixed abode. 

The shooting comes at a time of record tensions between the NYPD and many of the communities in the city. Widespread protests over the death of Garner, and the grand jury's later actions showed huge levels of suspicion and distrust of law enforcement and the justice system. 

Last week officers were assaulted on the Brooklyn Bridge, where thousands of demonstrators gathered. 

Officers have complained that the citizens, as well as politicians including mayor Bill de Blasio, turned their back on them, while protesters routinely refer to the police as murderers and racists."...

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2 UPDATES:

12/22/14, 6:35pm: "Police: NY shooter saw protest, didn't participate," AP, by JONATHAN LEMIRE and COLLEEN LONG

"The gunman who fatally shot two New York City police officers watched a protest over police-involved deaths earlier this month, but did not participate.

Investigators say Ismaaiyl Brinsley was at a protest in New York's Union Square on Dec. 1, before a grand jury decided against charging a white officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man.

Police said Brinsley recorded part of the protest on his phone, like other bystanders. In online posts before the shooting, police say Brinsley vowed to kill police officers in retribution for the deaths of black men at the hands of white officers.

Investigators are trying to determine if Brinsley latched onto the cause for the final act in a violent rampage." via Free Rep..

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12/22/14, "NYPD Cop Killer Used App to Track Police Movements Since Early December," Breitbart, Kerry Picket

"NYPD Cop killer Ismaaiyl Brinsley was using a traffic app called Waze to track law enforcement’s movements, NYC Alerts tweeted on Monday.  According to an available screenshot, Brinsley was tracking two officers who were almost 4 miles away from him in Staten Island at 10:44 PM EST since the beginning of December. He thanks a friend of his on Instagram for pointing out the app is not “updated in real time” so it’s not that “reliable.”

Smartphone applications monitoring police activity have grown in popularity over the past few years due to decreased cost, portability, and accessibility to average citizens.
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"Instagram/Ismaaiyl Brinsley"

Some legal scholars debate that even listening to a police scanner radio in some states may not be legal for a private citizen. In the meantime, other police-oriented apps for citizens take it one step further.

One particular app, for example, called “Surrey Police” tracks a British police department’s movement in the UK. Gizmodo calls it “well intentioned” but states that the app is “supposed to give residents a sense of security—and also a heads up—about when there’s a crime being committed in the area, and how the police are responding. But come on, people! Has no one seen any crime movie ever? This seems like it will be of limited-if-any use to the public at large, and an unbelievable boon to the unsavory folk of Surrey.”" via Free Rep.
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12/22/14, "#NYPD Cop Killer Was Using WAZE App To Track Cops," Grant, breaking911.com

"WAZE is also commonly used to report police traps, accidents, and other hazards users encounter on the road.

It is not clear whether Brinsley used the WAZE application as a police location tool for the murders or simply as the application is intended to be used.
 
Brinsley posted this on Instagram.

He was having a conversation about police in the Staten Island area and thanked his friend “Nita Boo” for the heads up.

The Instagram page has since been taken down."

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12/22/14, "The Big Lie of the Anti-Cop Left Turns Lethal," Heather MacDonald, City-Journal.org. "The real story behind the murder of two NYPD officers."

"The elite’s desperation to participate in what they hopefully viewed as their own modern-day civil rights crusade was patent in the sanctification of Michael Brown, the would-be cop killer. He was turned into a civil rights martyr. His violence toward Wilson, and the convenience store owner he had strong-armed, was wiped from the record. Protesters across the country chanted “hands up, don’t shoot” at anti-cop rallies, allegedly Brown’s final words before Wilson shot him. Never mind that the source of that alleged final utterance, Brown’s companion Dorian Johnson, was a proven liar. There is no reason to believe his claim regarding Brown’s final words. 

Protesters’ willingness to overlook anti-cop homicidal intent surfaced again in St. Louis in November. A teen criminal who had shot at the police was killed by an officer in self-defense; he, too, joined the roster of heroic black victims of police racism. This sanctification of would-be black cop-killers would prove prophetic. The elites were playing with fire. It’s profoundly irresponsible to stoke hatred of the police, especially when the fuel used for doing so is a set of lies. Hatred of the police among blacks stems in part from police brutality during this country’s shameful era of Jim Crow-laws and widespread discrimination. But it is naïve not to recognize that criminal members of the black underclass despise the police because law enforcement interferes with their way of life. The elites are oblivious both to the extent of lawlessness in the black inner city and to its effect on attitudes toward the cops. Any expression of contempt for the police, in their view, must be a sincere expression of a wrong. 
 
Cop-killer Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who assassinated NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos on Saturday, exemplified everything the elites have refused to recognize: he was a gun-toting criminal who was an eager consumer of the current frenzy of cop hatred. (Not that he paid close enough attention to the actual details of alleged cop malfeasance to spell Eric Garner’s name correctly.) His homicidal postings on Instagram—“I’m Putting Wings on Pigs Today. They Take 1 of Ours . . . .Let’s Take 2 of Theirs”—were indistinguishable from the hatred bouncing around the Internet and the protests and that few bothered to condemn. That vitriol continues after the assassination. Social media is filled with gloating at the officers’ deaths and praise for Brinsley: “That nigga that shot the cops is a legend,” reads a typical message. A student leader and a representative of the African and Afro-American studies department at Brandeis University tweeted that she has “no sympathy for the NYPD officers who were murdered today.”

The only good that can come out of this wrenching attack on civilization would be the delegitimation of the lie-based protest movement. Whether that will happen is uncertain. The New York Times has denounced as “inflammatory” the statement from the head of the officer’s union that there is “blood on the hands that starts on the steps of City Hall”—this from a paper that promotes the idea that police officers routinely kill blacks. The elites’ investment in black victimology is probably too great to hope for an injection of truth into the dangerously counterfactual discourse about race, crime, and policing....

Since last summer, a lie has overtaken significant parts of the country, resulting in growing mass hysteria. That lie holds that the police pose a mortal threat to black Americans—indeed that the police are the greatest threat facing black Americans today. Several subsidiary untruths buttress that central myth: that the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks; that the black underclass doesn’t exist; and that crime rates are comparable between blacks and whites—leaving disproportionate police action in minority neighborhoods unexplained without reference to racism. The poisonous effect of those lies has now manifested itself in the cold-blooded assassination of two NYPD officers. 
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The highest reaches of American society promulgated these untruths and participated in the mass hysteria. Following a grand jury’s decision not to indict a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer for fatally shooting 18-year-old Michael Brown in August (Brown had attacked the officer and tried to grab his gun), President Barack Obama announced that blacks were right to believe that the criminal-justice system was often stacked against them. Obama has travelled around the country since then buttressing that message. Eric Holder escalated a long running theme of his tenure as U.S. Attorney General—that the police routinely engaged in racial profiling and needed federal intervention to police properly.
University presidents rushed to show their fealty to the lie. Harvard’s Drew Gilpin Faust announced that “injustice [toward black lives] still thrives so many years after we hoped we could at last overcome the troubled legacy of race in America. . . . Harvard and . . . the nation have embraced [an] imperative to refuse silence, to reject injustice.” Smith College’s president abjectly flagellated herself for saying that “all lives matter,” instead of the current mantra, “black lives matter.” Her ignorant mistake, she confessed, draws attention away from “institutional violence against Black people.” 

The New York Times ratcheted up its already stratospheric level of anti-cop polemics. In an editorial justifying the Ferguson riots, the Times claimed that “the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life and a source of dread for black parents from coast to coast.” Some facts: Police killings of blacks are an extremely rare feature of black life and are a minute fraction of black homicide deaths. The police could end all killings of civilians tomorrow and it would have no effect on the black homicide risk, which comes overwhelmingly from other blacks. In 2013, there were 6,261 black homicide victims in the U.S.—almost all killed by black civilians—resulting in a death risk in inner cities that is ten times higher for blacks than for whites. None of those killings triggered mass protests; they are deemed normal and beneath notice. The police, by contrast, according to published reports, kill roughly 200 blacks a year, most of them armed and dangerous, out of about 40 million police-civilian contacts a year. Blacks are in fact killed by police at a lower rate than their threat to officers would predict. In 2013, blacks made up 42 percent of all cop killers whose race was known, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The percentage of black suspects killed by the police nationally is 29 percent lower than the percentage of blacks mortally threatening them. 

There is huge unacknowledged support for the police in the inner city: “They’re due respect because they put their lives every day on the line to protect and serve. I hope they don’t back off from policing,” a woman told me on Thursday night, two nights before the assassination, on the street in Staten Island where Eric Garner was killed.

But among all the posturers, none was so preening as New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio. In advance of a trip to Washington for a White House summit on policing, he told the press that a “scourge” of killings by police is “based not just on decades, but centuries of racism.” De Blasio embroidered on that theme several days later, after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict an officer for homicide in Garner’s death. (The 350-pound asthmatic Garner had resisted arrest for the crime of selling loose cigarettes; officers brought him to the ground, provoking a fatal heart attack.) “People are saying: ‘Black lives matter,’” de Blasio announced after the grand jury concluded. “It should be self-evident, but our history requires us to say ‘black lives matter.’ It was not years of racism that brought us to this day, or decades of racism, but centuries of racism.” De Blasio added that he worries “every night” about the “dangers [his biracial son Dante] may face” from “officers who are paid to protect him.” 

The mayor’s irresponsible rhetoric was a violation of his role as the city’s leader and as its main exponent of the law. If he really believes that his son faces a significant risk from the police, he is ignorant of the realities of crime and policing in the city he was elected to lead. There is no New York City institution more dedicated to the proposition that “black lives matter” than the New York Police Department; thousands of black men are alive today who would have been killed years ago had data-driven policing not brought down the homicide levels of the early 1990s. The Garner death was a tragic aberration in a record of unparalleled restraint. 
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The NYPD fatally shot eight individuals last year, six of them black, all posing a risk to the police, compared with scores of blacks killed by black civilians. But facts do not matter when crusading to bring justice to a city beset by “centuries of racism.”
New York police officers were rightly outraged at de Blasio’s calumny. The head of the officers union, Patrick Lynch, circulated a form allowing officers to request that the mayor not attend their funeral if they were killed in the line of duty—an understandable reaction to de Blasio’s insult. De Blasio responded primly on The View: “It’s divisive. It’s inappropriate,” he said. The city’s elites, from Cardinal Timothy Dolan on down, reprimanded the union. The New York Police Commissioner called the union letter “a step too far.” 

Meanwhile, protests and riots against the police were gathering force across the country, all of them steeped in anti-cop vitriol and the ubiquitous lie that “black lives” don’t “matter.” “What do we want? Dead cops,” chanted participants in a New York anti-cop protest. Two public defenders from the Bronx participated in a rap video extolling cop killings. Few people in positions of authority objected to this dangerous hatred. The desire to show allegiance with allegedly oppressed blacks was too great. 

The thrill of righteousness was palpable among the media as it lovingly chronicled every protest and on the part of politicians and thought leaders who expressed solidarity with the cause. At another march across New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, a group of people tried to throw trash cans onto the heads of officers on the level below them; police attempts to arrest the assailants were fought off by other marchers."...via Levin twitter

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