New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's request for a pause in protests against police violence while two slain officers are laid to rest on Tuesday may have won him plaudits in some quarters, but it did not do much to ease tensions between the black community and the NYPD. Some activists said de Blasio's request fueled the erroneous link between the protestors demanding reform and the lone shooter who killed two police officers in a patrol car in Brooklyn on Saturday.

"It's a time for everyone to put aside political debates, put aside protests," de Blasio said during a speech to a charity with close ties to the NYPD on Monday, "put aside all of the things we will talk about in due time."

The plea was met with sharp pushback from some activists who accused the mayor of caving to accusations that the protests are what motivated 28-year-old Ismaaiyl Brinsley to travel from Baltimore, Md., to shoot and kill officers Rafael Ramos and his partner Wenjian Liu in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

"By asking the protesters to stop," said Kevin Powell, president of  BK Nation, a national grassroots organization based in Brooklyn, "de Blasio is unwittingly linking the protests to the murders of these police officers, which is not the case at all."

Eugene Peryear, a spokesperson and activist for the  ANSWER Coalition, a national anti-racism organization, had sharper criticism for de Blasio. "This is the mayor capitulating to a campaign that has been waged by the police and their supporters who aren't interested in healing or respect," he told AlterNet. "What they are interested in is putting the genie back in the bottle. This major conversation that's arisen about racism and the impunity of police and killing young black males and women has been something that the NYPD has wanted to avoid….It's not about a pause. It's about forces trying to make sure this movement slows down so that they can sweep the issues back under the rug."