Thread by @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/ nymag.com/intelligencer/…

On Sept 16, 1992, 1000s of cops gathered outside City Hall to protest a new CCRB proposal. But they were also celebrating an officer cleared of killing a bodega clerk+and carried signs bearing racist, cartoon images of Dinkins. Several signs called him a “washroom attendant.” 2/

Giuliani riled up the crowd of cops—he said Dinkins was to blame for their low morale—and they mobbed City Hall. “I was getting concerned they’re gonna storm the building,” Dinkins' first deputy mayor of operations told @nahmias. The cops even took over the Brooklyn Bridge. 3/

When a Black councilmember tried to enter City Hall, a white officer blocked her entry, saying “There’s a n – – – – – who says she’s a councilmember.” On the Brooklyn Bridge, cops rocked the car of a Black councilmember, terrorizing her and its elderly Black passengers. 4/

Eric Adams, then a 32 year-old transit officer, arrived at the scene, and was furious. "Imagine the symbol of this. Here you had the first Black mayor, the chief executive of the city. And they [the rioters] basically said, ‘We don’t care who you are, if you’re Black.’” 5/

“It’s almost equivalent to what we saw at the Capitol,” Adams told @nahmias. But he said police participation in the riot wasn’t counterintuitive because in the U.S. history of lynch mobs, “many of them were being led in the South by sheriff’s marshals and other lawmakers.” 6/

Adams, NY's likely next mayor, was the *3rd* mayor to be present at the riot: Giuliani led it, and Bill de Blasio, then a 31-year-old junior aide in the Dinkins administration, was there, too. Aides say BDB still tells staff that the riot made a huge impression on him. 7/

After the riot, acting Police Commissioner Ray Kelly issued a 13-page interim report on the riot that didn’t mention Giuliani’s participation at all. Somehow, police only identified 87 of the estimated 10,000 officers and their supporters. Just 42 faced disciplinary charges. 8/

But early on it seemed the rioters would be held accountable by the local press. "We have a police force that is openly racist," wrote Jimmy Breslin, who noted that he saw an officer say to a female TV reporter, "here let me grab your ass" while others used the N word freely. 9/

Soon, however, the media assigned blame for the riot not on Giuliani but its target—Dinkins. A New York Times editorial scolded Dinkins for trampling "on the understandable sensitivities of the police" by meeting with the family of the slain bodega clerk. 10/

Thanks to the press and the Kelly report that failed to hold the police accountable, the 1992 riot was soon forgotten. The next year, Giuliani challenged Dinkins for mayor—and won. At his Election Night victory party, Giuliani thanked the NYPD and FDNY for helping him win. 11/

In his 2013 memoir, Dinkins accused Giuliani of “all but inciting the police to riot” and asked, “Would the cops have acted in this manner toward a white mayor? No way in hell. If they’d done it to Ed Koch, he would have had them all locked up.” 12/

"History has so many examples of storming places, houses, houses of worship places and going in and grabbing a Black person, a man in particular+hanging, beating," Eric Adams said. The riot “should be part of the historical narrative of these types of drunken lynch mobs." 13/

This piece, a collaboration with @NYMag, is the inaugural piece of @garrisonproj, a new project fiscally sponsored by @IRE_NICAR that will address the crisis of mass incarceration and policing through articles, reports, polling, and other media products. 15/fin