NYPD cop-killer is now helping reform the police in New York

The title of this post is the headline of a mind-boggling story from New York.  The gist is in the first two paragraphs:

He fatally shot an NYPD cop execution-style decades ago in a Queens bar — and now Richard Rivera is helping reform police in upstate New York as part of a state-mandated plan launched by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

The cop-killer — who murdered off-duty officer and father-of-four Robert Walsh in 1981 — sits on a panel for Ithaca and Tompkins County as part of its “Reimagining Public Safety Collaborative.’’

I would say, “You can’t make this up,” but that phrase is pitifully inadequate to describe the extent of the perversion it takes to put a police killer on a board to write up plans to “reform” the police.  This is so, not just for the obvious reasons, but because we already know how Mr. Rivera aims to reform police officers.  It’s not to send them to “de-escalation” education or “implicit bias” classes.  It’s to send them to the morgue.

Well, at least he has the virtue of experience.

The story continues:

“I don’t know if [Walsh’s] family would find this acceptable,’’ he said. “I can’t control that. What I can control is the way I’ve been living my life.

Yes, well, he might likewise have been able to control how he lived his life when he shot Officer Walsh point-blank in the head, but it would be racist, or something, to mention that.

“I’m holding the memory of Officer Walsh to the highest standard of policing in terms of a protector to the community, somebody who cares for the community.”

This is going to give mere insincerity a bad name.

One of Officer Walsh’s son’s has a different take.

“My father dedicated his life to serving and protecting New Yorkers. He should be the one serving on a panel to help re-imagine policing, but he’ll never get that chance.”

Which makes me wonder whether family members of murdered police have been put on any of these reform boards.  I don’t know, but I’d be grateful if any readers who do would give us the story in the comments section.

Rivera was 16 years old when he and four other gun-toting teens donned masks and strolled into the BVD Bar and Grill in Maspeth just after midnight Jan. 12, 1981, looking to rob the joint.

Officer Walsh, a 36-year-old highly decorated cop with 12 years on the force, was inside wearing a cowboy hat hanging out after his shift.

What unfolded next was nothing short of a coldblooded “execution,’’ a police official said in a front-page Post article at the time.

As the hero off-duty officer identified himself as a cop and reached for his gun to try to stop the robbery, Rivera shot him in the shoulder. Rivera then walked over to the officer as he lay helplessly wounded on the floor, pressed his gun to the cop’s head and blasted him again, authorities said.

Look, folks, don’t be so judgmental.  Rivera’s brain was still developing  —  so we are now told by “science” and “scholarly studies”  —  so he might not have understood that shooting a wounded man point-blank in the head would kill him.

On the other hand, maybe that’s exactly what Rivera understood, which is why he shot Walsh in the head rather than doing something more pleasant like shooting him in the kneecaps.

Rivera told The Post that he has since been working with a nonprofit helping to provide the homeless with shelter and food. He said his work with the upstate prison-reform committee mainly consists of surveying homeless people about how they may be criminalized just because they are on the streets or over their mental issues.

How is it these released criminals never work in an actual job producing somethingm or building houses or roads, and always wind up being “advocates” for yet another group that wants to live at the public trough?

Cuomo last summer ordered every municipality in the state with a police department to devise a plan reflecting “systemic reform” in the wake of Floyd’s death at the hands of cops in Minneapolis in May….

Cuomo said when announcing the police-reform measure that any local government failing to provide a plan would lose “a significant amount” of state money.

Wasn’t there a time when this was called extortion?

The upstate “collaborative” of which Rivera is a member did not return repeated messages from The Post seeking comment Monday.

We can at least be grateful that Gov. Cuomo did not spend all his time groping former aides, re-naming bridges after his family, or sending COVID patients to nursing homes to spread death to the unsuspecting elderly.  How much additional death will be spread by Mr. Rivera’s brand of “re-imagined” policing remains to be seen.