White Riot - In 1992, thousands of furious, drunken cops descended on City Hall

[DGUtley]

White Riot - In 1992, thousands of furious, drunken cops descended on City Hall — and changed New York history.


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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.

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https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021...=pocket-newtab

[Peter1469]

I don't recall that. I would have been in college then and didn't really watch TV. Studied and partied.

[FindersKeepers]

I think there's probably some truth interwoven in that story that's partly bull$#@!.

There's no evidence the officers were all (or even mostly) drunk, and in all the images I could find, I never found one with the caricature poster the writer describes. After the protest (not a riot), they found some beer cans, so obviously someone was drinking, but calling them "drunken" appears to be a false narrative.

From other accounts I read, it does appear there was some rasicm in the form of a few who used the "n-word," but not everyone heard it. Only a few heard it so it was limited.

This is actually the first time I've heard of it, so I don't think it turned out to be much. Revisionist writers will, of course, try to make it mean more.