New York City Police Officer Russel Timoshenko was all of 23 years old when he died Saturday. He’d been a cop for a year and a half.
When Timoshenko and his partner, Officer Herman Yan, pulled over a black BMW on Lefferts Avenue in Brooklyn last Monday, they were their doing job.
Nothing more.
Timoshenko never had a chance.
As the officer approached the car, gunshots came blasting through a window, with no warning, striking him in the face. The impact was so great, it blew him back several feet. The bullets cut across his spinal cord, paralyzing him.
This is what it means to be a New York City police officer.
Not for a moment should anyone forget the danger in this job.
Nor should anyone fail to appreciate how essential police work is to the proper functioning of the city.
Timoshenko immigrated from Belarus at the age of 7. A man of enormous promise, he’d done well at City College – but quit to pursue his long-held passion: being a cop.
Timoshenko is the 713th New York City police officer to die in the line of duty.
He joins the tragic ranks of Nicholas Pekearo, Yevgeniy Marshalik, Kevin Lee, Francis Hennessy, James Zadroga, Daniel Enchautegui and Dillon Stewart – all of whom fell in just the past two years, many as a result of gunfire.
As easy it is for average New Yorkers to gloss over the daily risks these brave men and women take, it’s also easy to undervalue their work.
Think back to before the Giuliani era, when murders topped 2,000 a year (compared to the annual figure of less than 600 now). Think of the flight – of businesses, jobs, residents – that lax enforcement has sparked in the city’s recent past.
Without courageous, dedicated, everyday cops – like Timoshenko and Yan (who also sustained two shots, one to his arm, the other stopped by his bulletproof vest) – putting their lives on the line, even for routine traffic stops, New York City simply couldn’t function.
Yet a safe city can push crime off the radar screen. New Yorkers often do take law enforcement for granted. Some even ache for the chance to criticize cops when mistakes, however inevitable, are made.
That, in turn, can lead to a relaxation of crime-fighting laws – a trend that may be under way right now.
In recent years, Albany has rolled back the tough Rockefeller drug laws, for example. The courts essentially threw out the death penalty, which was supposedly restored in the mid-’90s, on technical grounds, and lawmakers have seen no reason to fix it.
Even killing a cop in New York won’t lead to a state-imposed death sentence.
But whether it’s time to reconsider these trends is a matter for another day.
Right now, the thoughts of every New Yorker are with the family of Officer Russel Timoshenko. The city’s debt to him – and all the officers of the NYPD – cannot be understated.