You think Rudy Giuliani has changed? Not really:
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 making 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.
“‘You don’t treat these guys with respect,’” Steisel recalled Caruso telling him. “‘When you create a Civilian Complaint Review Board, which is going to challenge everything they do, it’s just going to respond to “Black whining.”’”
Steisel remembered Caruso telling him, “‘If you don’t respect them, you’ll never have a safe city again.’”
This sentiment was echoed in the summer of 2020 when everyone was so nervous about upsetting the police in the wake of the George Floyd murders and blithely asserted that they would leave people to die in the streets if they didn’t get their way. This is one of the underpinnings of authoritarianism and the right has been deploying it for many, many years.
Lo and behold, good old Rudy, “America’s Mayor” was right in the middle of it:
The day of the protest, Rudy Giuliani was also outside the building with a microphone. Giuliani, a former U.S. Attorney and failed mayoral candidate in 1989, declared, “The reason the morale of the police department of the City of New York is so low is one reason and one reason alone: David Dinkins!” The crowd roared.
“The mayor doesn’t know why the morale of the police department is so low,” Giuliani said. “He blames it on me. He blames it on you. Bullshit!” Giuliani then attacked an anti-corruption commission impaneled by Dinkins, which he said was created “to protect David Dinkins’s political ass.” More cheers rose from the crowd.
The demonstration began to spiral out of control, amplified by officers drinking at the pubs on Murray Street. Thousands more had shown up than were expected. Deputy Mayor Fritz Alexander called the police on the police. Acting Police Commissioner Ray Kelly dispatched a phalanx of officers to City Hall for crowd control.
That was when Steisel started to get scared.
“I was getting concerned they’re gonna storm the building,” Steisel said. “I mean, these fucking guys are crazy.”
This was the beginning of an outburst of violence that, for various reasons, has been all but scrubbed from New York’s historical memory. It not only involved Mayor Dinkins but was a formative experience for two future mayors and the city’s likely next mayor — who back then was a 32-year-old transit-police officer. “It’s almost equivalent to what we saw at the Capitol,” Eric Adams told me recently, referring to the Trump-inspired insurrection on January 6.
A closer look back at the City Hall Riot, as it deserves to be known, also serves as a reminder of the challenges Adams himself will face when he takes office next year: a police department that, all these decades later, still often seems hell-bent on resisting meaningful reform.
You can read the rest of the story at NY Magazine and it’s a doozy.
It’s also about corruption. Just today, this happened:
Federal investigators on Tuesday morning raided the Manhattan office of one of New York City’s main police unions in connection with an ongoing investigation, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
The union, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, represents about 13,000 active and retired police sergeants in New York. Its headquarters were searched as part of an investigation by the F.B.I. and the public corruption unit in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, the people said.
Investigators also executed a search warrant at the Long Island home of the union’s president, Edward D. Mullins, a person with knowledge of the operation said.
Although the precise focus and scope of the investigation could not immediately be determined, the search of Mr. Mullins’s home suggests that the inquiry is at least in some measure focused on him.
Nothing creeped me out more than seeing so many cops worshipping Trump. But then, this police riot and the politics it represents was the world in which he lived. They were very sympatico from the start.
It’s a dangerous culture and not just in NYC. Police reform is essential.