The wife of slain NYPD Jonathan Diller officer gives a stirring eulogy at his funeral
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.
Just another VICTORY for “Biden”, Soros and the Democratic Party…
Still, the now-familiar movie trope of black and white cop buddies hadn’t been seen much then, on screen or off, …
The original Lethal Weapon was likely the most prominent of those films. And neither the screenwriter, nor the producers had thought of it. The casting director thought that combination up, and the bosses liked it.
It’s just astonishing to me, that the Democrats and we as a nation have gone down this “soft on crime” path again. On the one hand, I’ve thought for a while that the Democrat party is essentially an organized crime syndicate in the guise of a political party. So it would make sense that they don’t really have a problem with criminality. But how is it that the electorate and even their voter base lets them get away with it?
}}} “Stay with what works.”
WHAT planet has Clinton spent the last 4 years on?
This could easily be a Trump slogan, FFS.
}}} Obama (…) said, “That’s the kind of president I want.”
Gee, what a shock. Someone who is his proxy and says and does almost everything Obama wants? Yeah, I can see how he would say that.
well it works for him, I had an instant distaste for that hillbilly grifter, ‘it saves time’
he was the seedpod for many progressive elements, like the motor voter law, the cra revisions that sparked the subprime crisis, so the bla was so called blm in embryo the black panther gala sponsored by leonard bernstein, was blm in microcosm, of course Hillary was for ‘killing the pigs’ at the Yale Law school if memory served,
Tommy Jay
How does the base let them get away with such things?
Trying to grok the thinking of some friends and relations who take that view, the best I can come up with is if it horrifies normal people, they’re all for it and will fall for and repeat any rationalization no matter how screwy.
Horrifying the norms must be their way of figuring out what’s progressive. Justifications come later, no matter how silly.
And, it’s a “price we have to pay”, “we” being people they’ve never met and shouldn’t speak to if they did.
Richard – they’re called “luxury beliefs” (by Rob Henderson, whose substack is great, as is his book, Troubled.)
The elite and wannabes need a way to distinguish themselves from the normal folk, and this has become one of the main ways to show superiority.
Especially “moral” superiority, because once something becomes an issue of morality, the usual cost-benefit analysis can be ignored, or even demonized.
Cops enforce laws, and all laws restrict the freedom of some individuals to hurt other people, often including hurting themselves. Being anti-cop allows those dominating culture and political power to continue to feel like they’re the (morally superior) underdog, the David vs. Goliath, the “victim” against the oppressive cop.
It’s actually reality that is usually oppressing such snowflakes, and their doomed search for a cosmic justice which would require that life NOT be unfair.
But
life is unfair.
There is no “just” way to compensate for the unfairness of life. Money, IQ, beauty, health; age.
I am happily pro-cop. As Neo’s post reveals, the cops shot dead by black thugs were all men devoted to service, in the military and as policemen.
It is regretted but true, as Charles Murray showed in his book “Facing Reality”, that the average American black male’s IQ is ten points lower than that of the average white male’s.
We can’t make them smarter or less violent. Look at the FBI data!
Tom Grey
I get the “luxury beliefs”. Climate change is one. They’ve never paid a dime voluntarily with the possible exception of recycling their plastic.
But I get a vibe–maybe it’s just me–that there’s a substantial extra value to something which horrifies normal people. In fact, it doesn’t even need to make the slightest sense; rationalizations will abound. Just so those rednecks, MAGA types, those without college degrees, think it’s a really bad idea because it costs them, in some cases like this one, catastrophically.
Hence, I would suggest, how “Try That In A Small Town” was taken. The luxury belief wouldn’t work there. The putative victims wouldn’t allow it and that’s not the way things should be.
As I say, I get the luxury thing, but I think there’s an additional layer.
Cicero:
Thomas Sowell’s response to the IQ data and your statement about “we can’t make them smarter.”: