The Forgotten City Hall Riot

[Nevilledog]

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Tweet text:
Ethan Brown
@ethanbrown72
Nearly 30 years before the Capitol Insurrection, Giuliani led a riot of 10,000 furious, drunk NYPD officers outside New York City Hall. Their target? The city's first Black Mayor, David Dinkins. It's a story that's never been fully told—until now. 1/

The Forgotten City Hall Riot
In 1992, thousands of drunken cops raged against the mayor of New York — leaving an indelible mark on the city’s likely next mayor.
nymag.com
7:16 AM · Oct 4, 2021

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/10/the-forgotten-city-hall-riot.html


At around 11 a.m. on September 16, 1992, Norm Steisel heard a roar from outside his office in City Hall. Peering out the window, he saw thousands of off-duty police officers filling the narrow park that surrounds the building, a grand neoclassical structure that, all of a sudden, had started to feel like the tightest of traps.

Steisel, then first deputy mayor of operations, heard officers chanting, “Dinkins gotta go!” and “The mayor’s on crack.” They carried signs bearing racist cartoon images of Mayor David Dinkins with humongous lips and nose and an Afro, including several calling the city’s first Black mayor a “washroom attendant.”

The officers had a permit to protest, which confined the demonstration to Murray Street, a road perpendicular to City Hall lined with Irish pubs. They were mad that Dinkins was pushing a bill that would change the composition of the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), the oversight body that examined complaints of police misconduct, from half-cop–half-civilian to all civilian and make it independent of the New York Police Department. The bill was part of a wave of measures proposed by cities across the country in the wake of the shocking, caught-on-tape beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in March 1991 and, just months earlier, the April 1992 acquittal of all four officers in the case.

Dinkins was uptown attending a funeral, which meant that Steisel was the highest-ranking person in the administration inside City Hall. Days later, Steisel talked to Phil Caruso, president of the New York City Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (which later changed its name to the Police Benevolent Association, or PBA). Caruso, a powerful figure who was respected by the rank and file, tried to explain the officers’ anger.

*snip*

Author has a companion thread

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1445029975439126531.html

[niyad]

1. Thank you for this most illuminating piece of history. Not surprised at all that

ghouliani was leading it.

[electric_blue68]

2. Oh, I REMEMBER this! 😤 TY Nevilledog for post & link.

I know the area, including City Hall Park, too.

It was infuriating to see/hear the disgraceful racism of the cops, and effin' bellowing ghouliani on the news.

I remember the Councilwoman being insulted,
but I didn't know they'd spilled on to the Brooklyn Bridge
and terrorized the other official, and car occupants. I remember the "washroom attendant" insult.Ugh. Glad I was no where near it!