REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, NEW YORK -- New York Mayor Bill de Blasio implored protesters on Monday to wait until after the funerals of two policemen shot dead in an ambush before resuming rallies that have roiled the city and beyond over the deaths of black men at the hands of police.

"It's a time for everyone to put aside political debates, put aside protests, put aside all of the things we will talk about in due time," de Blasio said in a speech to a charity with close ties to the New York Police Department, two days after Rafael Ramos (40 years), and his partner, Wenjian Liu (28 years), were killed.

"Let's comfort these families, let's see them through these funerals," de Blasio said in his speech, hours after visiting the officers' grieving families with Bill Bratton, the police commissioner. "Then debate can begin again."

But de Blasio's plea was quickly dismissed by several activist groups that vowed to continue protests that have stirred the city daily after grand juries chose not to indict police officers who killed Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

But the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist representing the families of Garner and Brown, said de Blasio's call was too nebulous to heed.

"Is a vigil a protest? Is a rally?" Sharpton said in a telephone interview, calling de Blasio's comments "an ill-defined request."

The men were shot as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn, and their deaths electrified tensions that had been coursing for months between City Hall, the police department and the reform-minded protesters who voted for de Blasio in large numbers.

Similar protests, some of them violent, have taken place across the United States, provoking a bitter debate about how American police forces treat non-white citizens that has drawn in President Barack Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder.

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