The brother of the Queens cop who was fatally shot while on duty 30 years ago reflected on his loved one’s life — and how his death shaped the future of the NYPD.
“It was a very different New York then,” Larry Byrne, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal matters, told John Catsimatidis on AM 970’s “Cat’s Rountable” Sunday. “It really was a turning point in a year when we were approaching 2,000 homicides and thousands of shootings.”
Byrne’s brother, Edward, was assassinated on the early morning of Feb. 26, 1988 while he was sitting in his police car, guarding the home of a targeted witness in a drug lord’s trial. He was 22.
Howard “Pappy” Mason, who ran a drug gang in the neighborhood, had instructed other gang bangers to kill a cop as a way to “intimidate law enforcement and send a message,” Byrne recalled on the radio.
“He called his gang and said, ‘We have to send a message to the cops — they take one of us, we take one of them. You have to kill a cop,'” Byrne said.
Eddie was shot five times in the head, justඣ five days after his birthday and less ಞthan one month since he had joined the force, his brother said.
“Really, everybody in New York and the country woke up and said, ‘If an armed police officer in uniform could be assassinated by drug dealers, then none of us are safe,’ And that’s when the battle in earnest began to take back the city.”
Eddie’s death prompted the creation of a federal criminal justice grant in his name designed to improve the policing system.
Three decades later, crime is at its lowest point since 1951 — with less than 300 murders in 2017 — and officers are striving to strengthen their relationships with the community through the department’s neighborhood policing initiative.
“It’s important that we remember 30 years later, and that we…never go back to those terrible days when no one in New York City was safe.”