In 1992, David Dinkins, the first African American mayor of New York City, proposed creating an all-civilian Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) to address reports of racial discrimination by the NYPD, in part due to the national outcry that followed the LA Riots earlier in the year caused by the acquittal of four of the policeman involved in the Rodney King police brutality case.
The idea being that the pre-existing CCRB, which was intended to address complaints against the NYPD and provide oversight, was then comprised of half-civilians and half-police officers, with Dinkins proposing that instead it become fully independent and comprised entirely of non-police members to enable to do its job without any conflicts of interest.
Unfortunately, between this, Dinkins refusing to allow the NYPD to have semi-automatic weapons, and his embracing the family of Jose "Kiko" Garcia, an undocumented Dominican immigrant who was fatally shot by NYPD officer Michael O'Keefe and whose death triggered the 1992 Washington Heights Riot, the police union called the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York decided to hold a rally to voice their displeasure...
Which quickly escalated to the 1992 Patrolmen's Benevolent Association Riot.
It all went down on September 16, 1992, when the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association organised a rally along the pub-lined Murray Street, which ran perpendicular to City Hall. The increasingly drunken cops quickly numbered around 10,000 people, where they chanted racist slogans against the Mayor, held up signs depicting Dinkins doing various sex acts, and accosted African American City Councilwoman Una Clarke to prevent her crossing the street.
And among the speakers that incited the riot? One, then failed, mayoral candidate Rudy Guiliani, who had lost to Dinkins in the 1989 election, and was there to pour more metaphorical gasolene on the fire like the sore loser he always was.
“The reason the morale of the police department of the city of New York is so low,” Giuliani says on video, “is one reason, and one reason alone: David Dinkins!”
“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.
This was followed by the cops damaging cars and blocking the Brooklyn Bridge as they attempted to storm City Hall, and while Dinkins himself wasn't present, both Deputy Mayor Fritz Alexander and Acting Police Commissioner Ray Kelly had to ironically summon on-duty police officers to City Hall for crowd control against their colleagues.
As NY Magazine describes,
A group of officers lined up in front of the doors to City Hall. At one point, they let a woman attending the protest, who may have been the widow of a fallen officer, inside. “Someone yelled that they had arrested her and the mob of officers outside rushed the building,” remembered Bob Liff, a former City Hall reporter at Newsday who was inside the building at the time.
“In all my years there, with lots and lots of demonstrations, it is the only time I ever remember the cops slamming the doors shut and putting the bars across the doors to keep anyone from getting in,” Liff said. “It is also the only time I remember feeling any sense of fear inside City Hall.”
Repelled from the building, the cops smashed cars, they blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, they beat up multiple people (including several reporters or just civilians that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time).
Some of the city’s newspaper columnists, including Jimmy Breslin, the poet laureate of the city’s blue-collar working class, were repulsed. According to a column he wrote the next day, Breslin saw an officer in a PBA shirt saying to a female television reporter, “Here, let me grab your ass.” He saw one officer yelling “across the beer can held to his mouth, ‘How did you like the n - - - - -s beating you up in Crown Heights?’” Another said, “Now you got a n - - - - - right inside City Hall. How do you like that? A n - - - - - mayor.”
In the aftermath of the riot, it was condemned by many, with some likening it to a Southern lynch mob. Of the 10,000 cops involved in the riot, 87 were able to be positively identified, and of those only 42 were actively investigated for any kind of misconduct (not, as you'd think criminal charges). Of those, only a handful actually received any actual punishment, including one of two policeman who decided to beat a random guy on the subway in the midst of the riot, with the officer getting charged with felony assault but with it getting bumped down to a misdemeanour, leading to his dismissal.
As for Giuliani and his heavily publicised appearance at the rally?
He refused to apologise for his part in the proceedings, refused to acknowledge hearing any racist and inflammatory remarks at the rally turned riot, and the following year rode the support he got from the primarily white boroughs to winning the 1993 New York Mayoral election. Rudy claiming that Dinkins and the African American communities comments about the obvious and open racism on display by the NYPD being examples of them retreating “into black victimization.”
So it's in this context that we have his Broken Window policies, such as Stop And Frisk which were intentionally intended to target minority neighbourhoods and citizens, and, decades later, his support for the January 6th rioters. The man was always very up front with who he was, which makes the irony of him managing to even burn through the good will that being mayor during 9/11 bought him is testament of how much work he put into being a terrible person.
