Part one of a two-part retrospective on how the police fought New York’s last socialist mayor. Read part two here.
The year was 1989, and change was in the air.
It was the buzzy glory days of early hip hop; the summer of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” and Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It?”, recorded in those months and featuring a tossed off shout-out now immortalized in New York history: “Mr. Dinkins won’t you please be my mayor? / You’ll be doing us a really big favor,” rapped Phife Dawg, the group’s affable sidekick, over a sample of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”
Dinkins obliged. A mustachioed ex-Marine, lawyer, and state assemblyman, New York’s 106th Mayor was a tennis-loving, 20th Century grandpa out of a Wes Anderson movie; at turns thoughtful, stodgy, slick, cranky, patient, hapless, and profound. He had a minor scandal involving unpaid taxes in his past, a habit of using overly formal language, and looked great in a mid-century suit.
Powered by the still glowing embers of the Rainbow Coalition that Jesse Jackson had assembled for his own presidential run the previous year, Dinkins rose carefully to power. At the time, the New York Democratic Party was bogged down by a scandal involving the Italian mafia that was wide ranging enough to taint the reputation of the long-serving Mayor Koch.
Dinkins also happened to be a member of Democratic Socialists of America. Curiously, no political hay was made of the city’s first Black mayor’s status as a card-carrying member of an explicitly socialist organization. Amid the death rattle of the USSR, as American culture shifted from ’80s cynicism into the cultural sonic boom of the 90s, the tag was considered merely symbolic, if not downright dusty.
It wasn’t a New York mayor’s first dalliance with the label. LaGuardia, a New Deal Republican, ran and won on the Socialist Party ticket at one point, and worked with a coalition of labor leaders, Socialists and even Communists in the city government to enact his agenda, all while flaunting his supposed ‘radicalism’.
But anyone holding their breath for institutionalized ‘Radical Leftism’ would be disappointed. Though he allocated plenty of funding for things like housing and after school programs, Dinkins’s term would consist largely of austerity programs, expanding the police force, and arranging the lease of the crime-ridden Times Square to Disney.
The murder rate was at an all-time high in 1990. The killing of Yusuf Hawkins, The Central Park 5 Case, and the Crown Heights Riots dominated the news. Racialized grudges and injustices blossomed into tense neighborhood stand-offs and fiery riots.
Though crime would decline across the board—by double digits in some categories—during his term, the seeds Dinkins planted were slow to sprout and the vision of a city wracked with crime and racial tension was still fresh. Dinkins also simply had trouble controlling the narrative, with stories circulating about the sound of gunshots interrupting a speech he was giving on gun control. An honorable product of the Silent Generation, Dinkins also avoided political bloodsport, declining multiple times to air negative attack ads on opponents.
It was a problem some of his political enemies did not share—least of all the NYPD’s largest union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.
Dinkins had taken heat for a perceived failure to contain the Crown Heights riots in 1991, in which over 150 police officers were injured. The next year, Dinkins further angered the reliably anger-able union by meeting with the parents of Jose Garcia, a nineteen year old with a petty criminal record who had been killed by an NYPD bullet. For cops accustomed to viewing the city as a war zone, this was treachery.
Dinkins had also come out against the idea of arming cops with semi-automatic weapons. Worst of all, he had a plan to change the Civilian Complaint Review Board to be all civilian—to the horror of PBA President Phil Caruso, who groused that it would make the NYPD accountable to “Black whining.”
An insurrectionary mood brewed. In a jarring scene, a cop stepped out of line during an NYPD roll call Dinkins was attending one morning to offer an impromptu formal complaint to the mayor. Dinkins engaged in a prolonged tit for tat with the cop, offering blunt resistance to the idea that he had snubbed the department— along with an awkward quote for the New York Times to print: “People die in riots, you know. Sometimes there are police officers who die in riots.”
A few days later, the Times would write about Dinkins and cops again in a tone that suggested things were being smoothed over. But the morning the story went to press, things were taking a different turn. Rudy Giuliani, Dinkins’ rival in the ‘89 race that elevated Dinkins from Manhattan borough president to mayor —was about to shape one of the key moments of modern New York history: he would incite a genuine NYPD riot.
Giuliani was the Flatbush son of a mob enforcer father—who allegedly “broke legs, smashed kneecaps, [and] crunched noses” as muscle for a loan sharking operation—and a Mussolini-sympathizing mother. He went to become a crusading prosecutor, spending the ’80s waging a headline-grabbing crusade against the Five Families.
He had run an aggressive campaign for mayor in 1989, promising to “take back our city, from the violent criminals in the street to the white collar criminals in their office suites,” but stumbled in the home stretch thanks to the cracks already forming in his public image. As many NYC politicos had come to realize, Rudy was a creature of seething ambitions, with a need for dominating his foes and a knack for expressing himself through risky public spectacle. It was a combination of factors that was starting to seem downright combustible. Someone like that could be a problem—dangerous, even.
He also had a grudge. The night he folded to Dinkins in ‘89 at the Roosevelt Hotel, hundreds of his supporters, fueled by conspiracy theories of voter fraud in Black neighborhoods, chanted against his concession. Though he didn’t indulge them, according to multiple sources, it was the night something may have snapped in Rudy.
By 1992, he would tell journalist Jack Newfield, “They stole that election from me. They stole votes in the Black parts of Brooklyn and in Washington Heights. Illegal Dominican immigrants were allowed to vote in Washington Heights.” (Racist paranoia aside, it was a bizarre claim for Giuliani to make- his support had always been rock bottom among Blacks, to the point where his advisor, Fox News’s Roger Ailes, once shrugged, “We’re going to get one percent of the Black votes by mistake”.)
After his narrow loss in the 1989 election, Rudy spent Dinkins’s term consolidating a team of power brokers and gorging himself on policies dreamed up by conservative think tanks. One item on his to-do list: cozy up to the PBA— they hadn’t always been simpatico, thanks to Rudy’s willingness to go after internal corruption while he had been a prosecutor. But by September 16th, 1992, they were.
That day, the union bussed in thousands of off duty cops and supporters for a rally around 10 in the morning on Murray Street, across from City Hall. The crowd turned out much larger than expected: around 10,000 (the NYPD itself around the time numbered 32,000) with 300 of their fellow officers deployed for crowd control.
The assembled crowd was mostly younger, white and male. Pictures from the day show a sea of faces adorned with square suburban cuts, mustaches, ballcaps and shades— squinting, smirking, glaring, T-shirts tucked under belts into long jean shorts and puffy white sneakers, like Halloween costumes or variations on a meme. Naturally, a lot of them were armed.
From the start, there was an air of entitled belligerence, with an ugly racist overtone. Most of the assembled were chanting or showing off slogans like, “Fight Crime—Dump Dinkins” or “No Justice, No Police.” “The Mayor’s on Crack” was another popular one. Dinkins was called a “washroom attendant,” a favored slur for the mayor at the time.
The group marched twice around the building, singing and chanting, then headed to Murray Street, lined with Irish pubs, for the rally. Michael O’Keefe, the police officer recently acquitted for shooting Garcia, spoke. Later, Giuliani took the mic.
“The mayor doesn’t know why the morale of the police department is so low. He blames it on me. He blames it on you,” said Giuliani. Next to him stood a mannequin dressed as a police officer and wrapped in chains.
“Bullshit!” He shouted in his pinched, nasal voice. His campaign was on: a supporter weaved through the crowd, passing out voter registration forms.
The union president Phil Caruso spoke, painting the occasion with Lord of the Rings scale epic-ness: “The forces of evil are all around. They are trying to surround us. They are trying to defeat us.”
The crowd, already turning delinquent, wasn’t happy with all the speakers: a congresswoman from Staten Island was heckled with a shout of “Homo!”
The tight corridor of downtown Manhattan provided an ideal geographical bottleneck for their collective rage: officers not wishing to join the ruckus could shuffle off toward the bars on Murray Street to get soused in the shade of plausible deniability, while antsy drunks could head the opposite way to blow off steam. Soon the streets were littered with empty bottles and cans.
Somewhere in the overflowing crowd, two guys climbed up on a bus holding a banner denouncing the Civilian Review Board, sending the already rowdy horde into a frenzy.
As if in the midst of some medieval siege, the doors to City Hall were barred shut.
“Take the Hall! Take the Hall!” they chanted, and swarmed over the sawhorse barricades toward the steps of the building.
Brian Jones Kraft is a writer who has been living in Bushwick for over a decade and a half. He has previously written extensively about the legacy of Andrew Cuomo.
Leave a Reply