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

The reaction from officers watching Officer Rafael Ramos’ funeral on giant TV screens outside the church follows comments from police union officials who said Mayor Bill de Blasio contributed to a climate of mistrust toward police amid anti-police protests.

Inside Christ Tabernacle Church in Queens , however, mourners gave de Blasio polite applause before and after his speech. The mayor said hearts citywide were aching after the shootings that left Ramos and his partner dead. Police union officials have said de Blasio contributed to a climate of mistrust towards police amid protests over the deaths of two unarmed black men, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in the New York borough of Staten Island, who were killed by white officers.

At a hospital after the Dec 20 shooting of the two New York officers, the police union’s president, Patrick Lynch, and others turned their backs on the mayor in a sign of disrespect.

Lynch blamed the mayor then for the officers’ deaths and said he had blood on his hands.Weeks before the shooting, Lynch suggested that officers sign a petition requesting that the mayor not attend their funerals were they to die in the line of duty. Cardinal Timothy Dolan and others had since tried to temper the rhetoric. De Blasio followed Vice President Joe Biden and Gov. Andrew Cuomo on the roster of speakers eulogising Ramos. Officers watching the funeral service outside joined those inside in applauding when Biden called the New York Police Department 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 Brooklyn street “an attack on all of us”.

The attack shook the city and put a halt to large-scale local protests criticising police over a series of high-profile deaths of unarmed black men. Funeral plans for Ramos’ partner, Officer Wenjian Liu, have yet to be announced.

When the Ramos family arrived, the eldest son — wearing his father’s NYPD jacket — was hugged by a police officer.Ramos was described on Friday during an eight-hour wake as a selfless, caring and compassionate man.

“What happened to my father was a tragedy,” Ramos’ son, Justin, said in a tearful eulogy viewed by hundreds of officers in the street who watched on giant television screens outside the crowded church. “But his death will not be in vain”.

Published in Dawn, December 28th, 2014