New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, spoke on Tuesday at the funeral of Miosotis Familia, a police officer who was ambushed and killed in a parked vehicle last week. De Blasio said the NYPD needed “solidarity and support” from the public.

The mayor spoke after he was criticised – by, among others, Donald Trump – for spending last weekend with world leaders in Germany as his city grappled with Familia’s death, early on 5 July. De Blasio attended the wake on Monday.

“We’ve watched with horror these attacks on our police here in New York City and all around our country,” De Blasio said at the funeral, at a 4,000-seat landmark theater in the Bronx. “It sickens us, and we know they cannot be tolerated, and we know they must end.

“We must end it. We must help our police in every way, just as we ask them to help us in our moment of need … They need us to be their eyes and ears. They need our solidarity and support.”

The police commissioner, James O’Neill, took aim at protesters and the media for what he sees as too much criticism of officers, saying Familia’s death “should remind everybody that the civility of our city rests on a knife’s edge”.

“Where are the demonstrations for the single mom who cared for her elderly mother and three children?” he asked to a thunderous, extended standing ovation from an audience packed with police officers. “There is anger and sorrow, but why is there no outrage?”

O’Neill said safety and order was a shared responsibility between police and residents and pressed the public “to make a commitment to help your police”.

“She embodied the American dream,” De Blasio said of Familia, who he called a hero who “lived life the right way”.



A sea of police in blue uniforms filled the Loews Paradise movie theater and the street outside to pay tribute to the 12-year officer and former healthcare worker. A child of immigrants with 10 siblings, she was the first person in her family to go to college and had always wanted to be a police officer, her family said.

“She was brave enough to do that knowing that there’s consequences, like danger, but she loved us,” said her 12-year-old son, Peter Vega, whom she called Jacob. “She wanted to sacrifice for us, so she did it.”

Familia was posthumously promoted on Tuesday, to detective. To her family, she was also a “protector, defender, guidance counselor, spiritual adviser … philosopher, philanthropist, theorist and mother”, said her 20-year-old daughter, Genesis Vilella. Familia’s other daughter, Delilah Vega, is Peter’s twin.

Familia, 48, was in an RV-like command post stationed in a high-crime Bronx precinct when Alexander Bonds walked up and fired once through the passenger window, striking Familia in the head. Bonds fled but police caught up and opened fire, killing him after, they said, he turned the gun on them. Bonds, 34, had been given a psychiatric evaluation days earlier at a hospital, which released him.

An ex-convict, he had railed about police and prison officers in a Facebook video last fall.

At the wake on Monday, Bill Simpson, 56, a Bronx resident, said he had never met Familia but felt the need to mourn her death.

“It hurt everybody,” he said.

After joining the NYPD in 2005, Familia worked her entire career in the Bronx precinct where she was killed. Familia was the first female NYPD officer to die in the line of duty since the 9/11 attacks.