Is the NYPD 'Slowdown' Over Yet?

Since December 20, the NYPD has been locked into a sort of cold war with the mayor of New York City. That's when two officers were assassinated inside their patrol car in Brooklyn—a targeted killing that many cops blamed on Mayor Bill de Blasio, who said after the Eric Garner grand jury decision that he worried about his biracial son's interactions with police.

First, officers turned their backs on de Blasio when he came to speak at both Wenjian Lee and Rafael Ramos's funerals. More importantly, they basically stopped making arrests—last week, the cops only wrote about 8.5 percent of the criminal summonses they wrote during the same period last year. Although the president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association—a.k.a. the police union—has denied that cops are taking it easy, the numbers don't lie. Cops feel betrayed, and they're taking it out on their boss by letting the small stuff slide.

But as a police shooting Monday night revealed, city cops aren't totally reneging on their duties. Two off-duty officers were shot in the Bronx while pursuing a pair of robbery suspects. The NYPD confirmed to VICE that Andrew Dossi, who is 30, and Aliro Pellerano, 38, are still in stable condition. (Bloomberg News previously reported that Dossi, who was shot in the arm and back, was critical.)

The officers were part of a five-person plainclothes team in the 46th Precinct that was about to end its shift, the New York Times reports. Rather than clock out and go home, they decided to investigate. At around 10:30 PM, they approached two suspects who were outside a Chinese Restaurant on Tiebout Avenue and East 184th Street. The suspects opened fire and later carjacked a white Camaro to get away, but at least two suspects have been taken into custody, the NYPD confirmed to VICE (city tabloids are reporting three).

"These officers did something that was extraordinarily brave this evening," Mayor de Blasio said in a statement around 2:30 AM this morning. He added that the two went beyond the call of duty. Some say that the injured officers refute the claim of a policing slowdown—and that their actions suggest an easing of tensions between cops and everyone else.

Still, it's too early to say the police are ready to throw in the towel on this whole chilled out experiment. It's one thing to go after violent criminals and another to issue the quality-of-life citations that NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton insists are behind the city's incredibly low crime rates. Bratton came to visit Andrew Dossi three times, and brought around the mayor along the second time. The wounded cop's father told the New York Post—the most reliable pro-cop outlet in town—that the injured officer wasn't too pleased with the visit.

"He deals with some crappy people every day and [is] getting no support, come on," Joe Dossi told the paper. "These are the guys in the trenches dealing with anything and everything."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.