An NYPD History Lesson

  

 CATO INSTITUTE, NAT & NICK HENTOFF

It was one of the biggest riots in New York City history.

As many as 10,000 demonstrators blocked traffic in downtown Manhattan on Sept. 16, 1992. Reporters and innocent bystanders were violently assaulted by the mob as thousands of dollars in private property was destroyed in multiple acts of vandalism. The protesters stormed up the steps of City Hall, occupying the building. They then streamed onto the Brooklyn Bridge, where they blocked traffic in both directions, jumping on the cars of trapped, terrified motorists. Many of the protestors were carrying guns and openly drinking alcohol.

Yet the uniformed police present did little to stop them. Why? Because the rioters were nearly all white, off‐​duty NYPD officers. They were participating in a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association demonstration against Mayor David Dinkins’ call for a Civilian Complaint Review Board and his creation earlier that year of the Mollen Commission, formed to investigate widespread allegations of misconduct within the NYPD.

In the center of the mayhem, standing on top of a car while cursing Mayor Dinkins through a bullhorn, was mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani.

“Beer cans and broken beer bottles littered the streets as Mr. Giuliani led the crowd in chants,” The New York Times reported.

Now, almost 25 years later, Giuliani continues to fan the flames of racial division. The two‐​term mayor, who has been a prominent surrogate for presidential candidate Donald Trump and is his likely choice to head the Department of Homeland Security, recently made headlines for condemning the Black Lives Matter protests as being “anti‐​American” and arguing that the term itself is “inherently racist.”

But Giuliani has yet to condemn the blatant racism that rippled through the crowd during the 1992 demonstration.

Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin described the racist conduct in chilling detail:

“The cops held up several of the most crude drawings of Dinkins, black, performing perverted sex acts,” he wrote. “And then, here was one of them calling across the top of his beer can held to his mouth, ‘How did you like the niggers beating you up in Crown Heights?’ ”

The off‐​duty cops were referring to a severe beating Breslin suffered while covering the 1991 Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn.

Breslin continued: “Now others began screaming … ‘How do you like what the niggers did to you in Crown Heights?’

“ ‘Now you got a nigger right inside City Hall. How do you like that? A nigger mayor.’

Newsday reported on other instances of racial abuse. City Councilwoman Una Clarke, a petite black woman, was blocked from crossing Broadway “by a beer‐​drinking, off‐​duty police officer who said to his sidekick: ‘This nigger says she’s a member of the City Council.’ ”

Former NYPD officer and New York state senator Eric Adams, currently serving as Brooklyn’s borough president, told Newsday at the time that the demonstration was “right out of the 1950s: A drunk, racist lynch mob storming City Hall and coming in here to get themselves a nigger.”

An internal‐​strategy report (the “Rudolph W. Giuliani Vulnerability Study”) prepared for the candidate’s 1993 mayoral campaign devoted more than 50 pages to the 1992 police riot under the all‐​caps heading “RACIST.”

“When dealing with direct questions about the police rally, Giuliani should acknowledge and criticize the underlying racial nature of the protest,” the study urged.

Giuliani never condemned the overt racism of the 1992 NYPD riot. Instead, he ordered the vulnerability study destroyed, but a copy was leaked to journalist Wayne Barrett in 2000.

Giuliani won the 1993 election against Dinkins and won re‐​election in 1997. During his two terms, the NYPD ran roughshod over the civil liberties of all New Yorkers, particularly in neighborhoods where most young men of color grew up under the thumb of constant police harassment. At the heart of Giuliani’s law enforcement policy, in case after case, was a lack of accountability for police misconduct. There is nothing that the onetime presidential candidate can tell us about proper policing that is worth listening to.

This isn’t the first time in recent years that Giuliani has rattled the chains of racial division.

In 2014, after a grand jury cleared NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, Giuliani criticized Mayor Bill de Blasio for publicly acknowledging a history of racism within the police department. “This helps to create this atmosphere of protest, and even sometimes violence,” he said on “Fox & Friends.”

Giuliani was particularly critical of de Blasio’s comment that he has had to train his own mixed‐​race son on how to avoid being victimized by the police: “I was always told the policeman’s always right. There’s a good reason for that: He’s got a gun.”

The lesson Giuliani should have learned a long time ago is that the police should always be held accountable, not only because they carry a gun in their holster, but because they have been entrusted with the full power of the state to use that gun to end human life.

“Making police accountable is essential,” said former NYPD detective David Durk, who, along with Frank Serpico, broke the blue wall of silence before the Knapp Commission in 1971. “At 3 o’clock in the morning, a cop is more powerful than the mayor, the governor and the president. He can kill you.”

 

Fires and Pepper Spray in Seattle as Police Protests Widen Across U.S.

From Los Angeles to New York, protesters marched in a show of solidarity with demonstrations in Portland, Ore. In Seattle, they smashed windows and set fires. A shooting at a protest in Austin, Texas, left one man dead.

NY TIMES

A series of strident new protests over police misconduct rattled cities across the country over the weekend, creating a new dilemma for state and local leaders who had succeeded in easing some of the turbulence in their streets until a showdown over the use of federal agents in Oregon stirred fresh outrage.

With some demonstrators embracing destructive protest methods and police often using aggressive tactics to subdue both them and others who are demonstrating peacefully, the scenes on Saturday night in places like Seattle, Oakland, Calif., and Los Angeles recalled the volatile early days of the protests after the death of George Floyd at the end of May.

in Seattle, where a day of demonstrations focused on police violence left a trail of broken windows and people flushing pepper spray from their eyes. At least 45 protesters had been arrested as of early evening, and both protesters and police officers suffered injuries.

Carrying signs such as “Feds Go Home” and shouting chants of “No justice, no peace,” some among the crowd of about 5,000 protesters stopped at a youth detention center and lit several construction trailers there on fire. Some smashed windows of nearby businesses, ignited a fire in a coffee shop and blew an eight-inch hole through the wall of the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct building, the police said.

The police responded by firing flash grenades, showering protesters with pepper spray and abruptly rushing into crowds, knocking people to the ground. After a flash grenade left one woman with bloody injuries, police officers shoved people who had stopped to help her.

In Austin, Texas, the police said one man was shot and killed just before 10 p.m. during a protest in the city’s downtown. In a live video from the scene, protesters are seen marching through an intersection when a car blares its horn. Seconds later, five shots ring out, followed shortly after by several more loud bangs.

The man who was killed may have approached a vehicle with a rifle before he was shot and killed, Officer Katrina Ratcliff said. Ms. Ratcliff said the person who shot and killed the man had fired from inside the vehicle. That person was detained and is cooperating with officers, she said. No one else was injured.

In Los Angeles, protesters clashed with officers in front of the federal courthouse downtown. Videos showed people smashing windows and lobbing water bottles at officers after protesters said the police fired projectiles at them.

The federal courthouse in Portland has been the scene of nightly, chaotic demonstrations for weeks, which continued again into Sunday morning, as thousands participated in marches around the city, the 59th consecutive day of protests there. Earlier, a group of nurses in scrubs had joined an organized group of mothers in helmets and fathers in hard hats, all assembled against the fence of a federal courthouse where federal agents — a deployment that has been a key focus of the recent demonstrations — have been assembled.

Protesters in several cities said the smoke-filled videos of federal agents firing tear gas and shoving protesters in Portland had brought them to the streets on Saturday. In addition to marching in solidarity with the Portland protesters, the demonstration in Aurora, Colorado was also in response to the death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old massage therapist who died several days after officers put him in a chokehold last summer.

In Seattle, protesters in June laid claim to several city blocks, pressuring the police to temporarily abandon a police station in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood and establishing a free protest zone that endured for several weeks. When the city authorities finally reclaimed the zone, there was little resistance. And things remained calm. The Seattle City Council began embracing plans to make substantial cuts to the police department budget, restrict the use of tear gas and put the city on a path to reimagining policing.

 Carmen Best, the Seattle police chief, stressed that a number of demonstrators also used violence. Some were tossing concrete blocks from a rooftop to the street below, she said. The coffee shop that was set afire had occupied apartments above it that had to be evacuated, she said.

Trump has seized on the scenes of national unrest — statues toppled and windows smashed — to build a law-and-order message for his re-election campaign, spending more than $26 million on television ads depicting a lawless dystopia of empty police stations and 911 answering services that he argues might be left in a nation headed by his Democratic rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Biden insisted last week that the president’s pledge to inject a federal law-and-order presence into the already volatile issue of policing shows that he is “determined to sow chaos and division. To make matters worse instead of better.”

The situation has left city leaders, now watching the backlash unfold on their streets, outraged and caught in the middle. Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle said in an interview Sunday that the city is in the middle of a self-fulfilling prophecy, with protesters infuriated by the federal presence in Portland smashing windows and setting fires, the very images of “anarchy” that the president has warned about.

Some cities had welcomed Mr. Trump’s offer to send additional law federal law enforcement agents in to help combat escalating gang violence and drug crime, but insisted they would brook no federal agents on their streets arresting and tear gassing protesters

.

Democratic city and state leaders pushed back against the new federal presence, but also expressed frustration that some on the streets were going too far and playing into the president’s gambit.

“No matter how many troops Donald Trump sends into American cities, it’s not going to distract them from their primary concern which is the coronavirus and their health,” said Jared Leopold, a Democratic strategist.

For city officials, the challenge is more immediate than the November election — it is bringing an end to nights of clashes on their streets.