Across the city, many black and Latino New Yorkers remained hostile to the police despite the shootings, a sentiment that has gathered force not only because of past incidents but also because a grand jury declined to indict officers in the recent chokehold death of Eric Garner.
At the same time, though, many New Yorkers embraced the police, rushing to the defense of a department they view as doing the difficult and often thankless job of maintaining order in the nation's largest city, especially following the killings of Liu and Ramos.
"The police are doing a great job, and we support them 100 percent," said John Lowe, who was with fellow workers from Rockafella Cleaning on Staten Island, the borough where Garner died and where many police officers live.
"Thank God for the police!" another man yelled.
"If these thugs would start acting like upstanding citizens," Lowe said, "we'd have a perfect community."
To New Yorkers such as Joe Guerrero, however, it's the men in blue who are ruining his community. The harassment from the police in his Lower East Side neighborhood is constant, he said. Two weeks ago, Guerrero said, without warning and for no apparent reason, officers patted him down as he walked along a street near his home.
"Nobody deserves to die," the 28-year-old Latino video technician said Monday as he paused to consider the two police officers who were gunned down in Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon. "Maybe a nice beating would be good," he said. "But that's it."
Across the street, Leakim Robinson, 24, an African American, expressed no such generosity as he lingered outside a deli with friends who complained of cops rarely facing consequences for their conduct.
"They've been killing us for 500 years," Robinson said. "I don't have no sympathy towards police."
In the Bronx, Marco Melgar, a construction worker, said he has seen the good and the bad of the police.
Melgar said he was inside one of the World Trade Center towers when the second plane hit on Sept. 11, 2001, and he walked down 28 flights of stairs to safety. "The police were helping everyone and giving directions," he said, recalling how the city embraced the department after the terrorist attacks.
But since then, he said, "there's more restrictions, less freedom. They tell you don't go certain places or do certain things."
Melgar also said that the economy, more than crime, was an underlying cause of the conflicts between the police and New Yorkers.
"People are under pressure," he said. "A lot of people are out of work. People are desperate. I see it all the time on the subway; when it's crowded, you can't even touch anyone, they get upset."
Over the past several decades, New York police conduct has prompted condemnation from community activists. In 1997, for example, Officer Justin Volpe used a broom handle to sodomize suspect Abner Louima at a Brooklyn stationhouse. After initially declaring his innocence, Volpe pleaded guilty once his case went to trial.
Two years later, officers fired 41 shots and killed unarmed immigrant Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. The officers were exonerated, though the city settled a civil lawsuit filed by Diallo's parents.
What's different about New York now is that the crime rate is far lower than it was in the 1980s, when the crack cocaine epidemic exploded, and the ranks of the police are more diverse.
New York is also far more affluent than it was a decade or two ago, with skyrocketing real estate prices placing new strains on neighborhoods no longer ignored by high-earning professionals.
The tension in New York also is exacerbated by what transpired in Ferguson, Missouri.
"What's happening in New York is magnified by what has happened in other places," said Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant who advises police unions across the country. "The cops are being questioned all over the place. New York is the biggest city in the country, with the largest police department, and everything that happens in New York reverberates nationally."
On Monday, as a police helicopter hovered above the Staten Island neighborhood where Garner died, John Wilkerson sat on a stool at the Hard Hat Cafe, voicing ambivalence.
"I could feel sympathy, I could feel empathy, but these are the same guys who are killing people," he said, alluding to Garner and the shooting of an unarmed man in a dark stairwell in a Brooklyn housing project. "If I was walking down the staircase, it could have been me," he said.
Richie Egan, a retired firefighter who was drinking coffee at a nearby pizzeria, aimed his ire not at the police but at de Blasio, President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. and the Rev. Al Sharpton, all of whom he derided as anti-police.
"Speaking out against the people protecting the country — how could you put them down?" Egan asked of Obama. Referring to Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the man who shot the officers Saturday before killing himself, Egan said, he "wasn't stable, but all the race-baiting pushed him over the edge."
At packed Rockefeller Center, where people came to see the famous Christmas tree, Steve Geehreng of Long Island said he was firmly behind the police force.
"First responders are here to help us," he said. Of the protests that have followed the Garner and Ferguson incidents, Geehreng said, "I don't think it's just."
John and Carol Crowe, visiting from Milwaukee, also expressed support for law enforcement. It's a "a tough, tough job," John Crowe said. Police "have to make split-second decisions," while everyone else has the luxury of being "a Monday-morning quarterback."
At the Red Hook projects in Brooklyn, where the towers of Wall Street could be glimpsed through the fog across the water, Shaheem Johnson, 51, a handyman, at first said he tries to maintain an open mind toward the police. But he said it's difficult when he learns of incidents such as Garner's death.
"We get bum deals," he said, between puffs of a cigarette, his face framed by a white goatee. "They're always going to say we were resisting arrest or we're doing drugs. It's always something."
He compared police efforts to protect Red Hook as an "invasion," as the department opened a substation in what was once a laundry facility on the property.
David Miller, 26, paused as he walked through the complex's rows of six-story brick buildings. Police officers stop him so often, he said, that he has come to regard the ritual as a fact of life.
"I hate the police — they're always harassing me," he said. "When the police kill, nothing happens. They get their badges back. We kill someone and we go to jail for the rest of our lives."
But to Serge Kapchits, who owns a smoke shop on Staten Island, what Miller sees as harassment is just protecting the city.
"I'm the last person to like cops," Kapchits said, explaining that he has had run-ins with the law. But, he said, "go to a bad neighborhood and take (the police) out of there for a month — it's going to fall apart."
In Brooklyn, the makeshift memorial where the police officers died grew on Monday, with strangers dropping off balloons, teddy bears and flowers.
Elizabeth Rodriguez, 74, called the officers' deaths "terrible" as she waited to be picked up by a car service at the Red Hook public housing complex where she lives.
"They weren't doing anything," she said. "You can't just come to New York and shoot our officers."
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