Police

 

Jay Liff stood on a cold and dark street corner in Jamaica at 1 a.m. on Tuesday, mourning a man he had never met.

 

Liff is a young police officer who spent six months in the 103^rd Precinct as part of Operation Impact, a program that sends officers fresh out of the Police Academy to high crime areas. This is exactly the type of work that Officer Edward Byrne was doing when he was assassinated at the age of 22 in the same precinct, a tragedy that has been bringing together police officers together to commemorate him for the past two decades.

 

“We gotta remember former brothers and sisters,” Liff said. “We all put on the uniform for the same reason.”

 

The vigil for Byrne’s death has become more than just a commemoration. It is an act of mourning that unites two generations of police officers in mutual recognition of the risk they take on the job.

 

Liff was one of 250 policemen who gathered on the corner of 107^th Avenue and Inwood Street in the early hours of Tuesday morning to listen to prayers, bagpipes, and speeches marking the 20^th anniversary of Byrne’s assassination.

 

Clusters of dark figures huddled together in the cold and quiet night, talking and laughing together before and after the ceremony. Noticeable in the crowd were two different groups of people: rookies and younger officers in uniform and older men dressed in civilian clothing.

 

Most of Byrne’s former colleagues are now retired, and for Ernie Naspretto, a captain who was a sergeant in the 103^rd Precinct at the time, the event it is a “weird and somber” gathering.

 

 “It’s always nice to see old faces, but it’s also melancholic because of why you’re here, what you are remembering,” he said.

 

He said that the numbers of retirees attending the ceremony has been dwindling year by year as it does for high school reunions. But many of the uniformed officers present were either in grammar or preschool at the time of Byrne’s murder.

 

“It’s good young cops don’t forget,” he said. “They are the most important group out of this whole crowd, because they have to keep it going. Without them, this area can go back to where it was, and then we are all losers.”

 

“They are the ones who have to keep this legacy alive, make sure we never go back to where we were,” he said.

 

Edward Byrne was shot several times in the head as he sat in his car, guarding the house of a drug-case witness at 107^th Avenue and Inwood Street on Feb. 26, 1988. A year later, four men were convicted of murder and received sentences of to 25 years to life.

 

Byrne’s murder is often is considered to have been the wakeup call that triggered the creation of the Tactical Narcotics Team in South Jamaica, which later got expanded throughout the city thanks to its success.

 

“This area is safer now than it has been in the last four decades,” said Naspretto, addressing the crowd. “You have to make sure we never go back to those days. Never. It’s the legacy of Eddie Byrne.”