Jonathan Diller was doing his job — and he was doing his job well. But the 31-year-old NYPD officer was shot and killed in Far Rockaway Monday evening by a man who shouldn’t have been free, with a weapon that shouldn’t have been on the street.
The city must mourn the murder of this good man, who leaves behind his wife and his 1-year-old boy, and politicians must do everything in their power to ensure that violent recidivists like the man who cut him down and his perpetrating partner are incarcerated for longer periods of time.
According to the Police Department, Diller approached a vehicle that was illegally parked at a bus stop and repeatedly asked the occupants to leave the car. Guy Rivera then shot Diller under his bullet-proof vest. The gun hit the ground, and Rivera was trying to get it, but a wounded Diller recovered it, potentially saving more lives.
But Diller’s life would not be saved.
His is the first NYPD line-of-duty death since the Harlem shooting that killed Wilbert Mora and Jason Rivera in January 2022. As news of the murder spreads, it is important for Americans to understand that cops are not at special risk of being killed here, in what is, remember, a very safe city overall.
But we rightly honor officers and their families because they understand before every shift that they are about to face precarious situations that could lead to violence, even fatal violence. Those worries are worsened when men like Rivera — and Lindy Jones, the other man in the car — cycle so freely in and out of custody, and have such easy access to guns.
Rivera has been arrested 21 times, say police, including nine times for felonies. He was locked up for assault in 2011 and released three years later. In 2021, he was released from another five-year prison stint — this time for criminal sale of a controlled substance — and out on parole, which ended last year.
As for Jones, he had been locked up for nearly a decade on attempted murder charges before his 2012 release. When the felon was hit with weapons charges last April, he was released on bail. New York State law doesn’t allow judges to consider the danger a defendant might present to the community, only the chances the accused might not return to court.
And so, under bail reforms signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2019 and revised three times since, a judge still looked at the man before him and determined that he should not remand him but should instead set a level of cash bail that enabled him to await disposition of his case not in jail but in freedom.
As for the gun that was Rivera’s lethal instrument, cops must determine how it got into New York City’s bloodstream. To their great credit, the NYPD seized an impressive total of nearly 6,500 illegal guns seized in 2023, nearly as many as it took off the streets in 2022.
The gun sweeps are essential and we remind those who pooh-pooh the preponderance of firearms on the streets that every single weapon in the hands of a horrid criminal can kill a fellow New Yorker, including, in this case, a very good man and a very good cop.
