What NYPD Officer Didarul Islam’s Sacrifice Reminds Us

On Monday, July 28, after 6 p.m., a deranged man who had driven to New York City from Las Vegas casually walked into the lobby of 345 Park Avenue and opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle. The perpetrator’s first barrage fatally wounded 36-year-old Didarul Islam—a Bangladeshi immigrant, a father of two, a husband to a wife expecting their third child, a true New Yorker, and a uniformed police officer in the NYPD who was working a paid security detail at the time. 

Officer Islam was one of four innocent victims killed in Monday’s shooting. The tragedy serves as a reminder of just how vulnerable a city like New York is to the kind of evil the shooter embodied. It also provides an opportunity, if a grim one, to recognize the everyday heroism that characterizes the men and women of the NYPD, who regularly risk their own safety and their loved ones’ peace of mind to serve their communities. 

Officers put their lives on the line when they approach a car during a traffic stop. They put their lives on the line when they chase armed suspects. And they put their lives on the line when they respond—as hundreds of officers did on Monday evening—to a flood of frantic 911 calls reporting an active shooter inside a midtown office building. 

It’s more important than ever that we reacquaint ourselves with the sacrifices that officers make for us every day. In a city like New York, where the police presence is so visible, it’s easy to take for granted that our calls for help will be answered. Add to that the complacency of a mainstream media that focuses more on what cops get wrong than on what they get right, and you can see why it’s getting increasingly difficult to find men and women willing to make such sacrifices. 

This isn’t just speculation. The NYPD has been struggling for years with recruiting and retaining talent. It has been forced to lower educational and physical standards for prospective applicants in order to fill academy classes fast enough to keep up with the flood of retirements and early separations. 

The hesitancy on the part of prospective recruits and veteran officers to don the uniform is understandable. The department is regularly the target of vicious protesters (like this former Zohran Mamdani intern berating a Muslim officer as a “pig”). Its officers are regularly condemned by the media when they make good-faith mistakes, and even when they have made no mistake. And all too often, district attorneys and judges undermine necessary and dangerous police work by releasing—and even refusing to prosecute—the perpetrators whom officers worked hard to put in cuffs. 

Officer Islam had so many reasons not to join New York’s Finest. He joined anyway. He didn’t have superpowers. He wasn’t invincible. He was just a regular guy working to support his family—and that makes him a hero in every sense of the word. May his sacrifice be an inspiration to us all and a source of consolation and pride for his family, especially his wife and children. 

As for those who gain notoriety by deriding the NYPD and the work that it does, I hope this tragedy will make them stop and consider something: the calls coming from those Park Avenue offices on Monday evening were not asking for mediators, social workers, or unarmed safety agents. They were asking for armed police officers. 

I hope they’ll also reconsider their efforts to diminish or sideline the NYPD. This attack reminds us that the public rarely has control over whether or when evil will darken our doorsteps. But we do have some control over who will be there to meet it when it does. 

Photo by NYPD News X Account / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images