Is the 4th murder of an NYPD officer random or evidence of escalating hostilities in the 'war on cops'?

What it is is horrible. THis needs to end but I really doubt BLM is oart of it.

Mr. Howard was believed to be among those sowing violence across a pocket of East Harlem, several men whose images and gang affiliations hang in police precinct roll-call rooms and whose faces are known to anticrime unit officers, like Officer Holder, 33, whose assignment includes confronting the most violent criminals. Indeed, one of the ways Mr. Howard knew the officer approaching him on a darkened pathway of F.D.R. Drive — besides by the silver shield dangling from his neck — was that they had encountered each other before, the police said. Mr. Howard had 23 arrests as an adult, including one in connection with a shootout in June 2009 on a basketball court in the East River Houses that wounded two bystanders: an 11-year-old boy and a 77-year-old man. (The case did not go forward, officials said, because prosecutors were unable to present any witnesses who could identify Mr. Howard.) Officer Randolph Holder and his partner, crossing the footpath at 120th Street, engage a man on a bicycle in an exchange of gunfire. Officer Holder is shot in the head and killed.
Source: New York Police Department
By The New York Times
Although he was one of 19 defendants in a roundup of alleged crack-cocaine dealers last October [2014] in the East River Houses, where he lived, publicly available court records show no violent felony convictions in his history. The 2009 shooting was sealed, officials said. And, rather than jail, Justice Edward J. McLaughlin of State Supreme Court in Manhattan diverted his case in December to a special court where he was eventually ordered into drug treatment, a decision that both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton denounced on Wednesday.
“If ever there was a candidate not to have been diverted, it would be this guy,” Mr. Bratton said.