A Brief History Of Past Protests Against Police Brutality In NYC—And How The NYPD Responded

As Henry Luna watched an entirely peaceful protest in Mott Haven on June 4th spiral into a bloody melee, with NYPD squads in riot gear beating and macing trapped protesters at random, he recalled never having seen anything like the militarized response in the last five years of marching against police brutality.

“It almost felt like pent-up anger...it was rage,” said Luna, a 55-year-old organizer with NYC Shut It Down. An officer punched Luna in the head, he said, and he lost a tooth and has hearing loss in one ear. “We’ve been brutalized, but not at this level, this is another level.”

To be sure, the NYPD has arrested protesters en masse in the past, including their sweeping crackdown at the Republican National Convention in 2004 (resulting in an $18 million settlement), and the clearing of Zuccotti Park in 2011 during Occupy Wall Street. But civil liberties advocates say the NYPD's systematic and citywide use of pepper spray and batons during the first ten days of protests against racist police violence represents a new level of brutality not seen in generations.

Chris Dunn, the legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, called the NYPD’s response to protesters “shocking and unprecedented” in modern times.

“I don’t think in 50 years we had the level of protest we’ve seen in New York City,” he said. “We certainly have not seen the level of police violence directed at protesters.”

But while the police crackdown on protests may be shocking for our recent memory, it follows a long history of violent clashes between NYC police and protesters that extends more than a century. 

“The violence is always blamed on looters, it’s always blamed on the people who are attacking property,” said Clarence Taylor, a professor emeritus of history at Baruch College and the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. “We feel that we need police to go in there and stop that, but police go beyond that.”

Harlem Riots of 1943

In August of 1943, a white policeman shot a Black World War II veteran. Crowds flooded the streets, hurling stones at police officers and store windows and causing an estimated $5 million in property damage. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia said the riots were “instigated and artificially simulated,” and the Manhattan District Attorney William Dodge blamed radicals, but Harlem leaders disagreed.

"[The] blind smoldering and unorganized resentment against Jim Crow treatment of Negro men in the armed forces,” was to blame, according to the Harlem Councilman at the time, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. “And the unusual high rents and cost of living forced upon the Negroes of Harlem."

La Guardia brought in thousands of police officers, National Guardsmen, and civilian volunteers to quell the mayhem. He implemented a 10:30 p.m. curfew in the neighborhood and lifted the wartime blackout so the NYPD could light up the area’s darkened streets. By the end of the turmoil, five people had been killed by police and hundreds more were injured.

"As you know a great many of the stores had their windows broken, and unfortunately there was a great deal of looting; this was done by small bands of hoodlums and rowdies," La Guardia told New Yorkers in a radio broadcast soon after. “We have the situation under complete control, thanks to the very splendid and intelligent work of our police department.” Over 300 were arrested in one night, the mayor said.

Riots of 1964

A little over two decades later, James Powell, a 15-year-old Black teenager, was killed by a white off-duty police lieutenant on the Upper East Side. Again looting and property damage followed, first in Harlem, then in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and South Jamaica, Queens. Rioters on buildings threw bricks and bottles at police officers below. This time, the NYPD responded with gunfire.

“Police ran out of bullets, and they had to wait for a truck to come so they could reload and continue shooting,” Taylor, the history professor, said. Hundreds were injured and one person was killed. Mayor Robert F. Wagner defended the police’s use of force, saying it was done on behalf of the people of Harlem.

“I saw the boarded up windows. I saw the crowds, the itinerant gangs, the residents clustered on their stoops looking fearfully out of their windows,” he said. “It is their persons and their property that along with all other persons and property that the police are under obligation to protect with all the force that is necessary and justified.”

But prominent African-American leaders criticized how police handled the situation. 

“The police must be discerning,” said James Farmer, the National Director of the Congress of Racial Equality during a WNBC roundtable following the riot. “It is their primary responsibility to protect the innocent, rather [than] to have a blanket oppression against people who happen to be in the streets at the time.”

Farmer had tried to contact Governor Nelson Rockefeller to call in the state’s National Guard, to protect Harlem residents against police, but Rocklefeller, who was vacationing in Wyoming at the time, couldn’t be reached. 

Protests of the Late 1990s

Protests against police brutality gripped New York City again in the late '90s, after an NYPD officer sodomized Abner Louima with a broomstick in 1997. Two years later, four NYPD officers fired 41 shots at Amadou Diallo, an unarmed 22-year-old in the Bronx who was killed outside his Bronx home. Both incidents prompted large-scale marches and sit-ins.

Led by Reverend Al Sharpton and the National Action Network, the demonstrations placed a strict emphasis on nonviolent civil disobedience, largely avoiding property damage and major clashes with the police.

“Thirteen hundred people, that we had get arrested at 1 Police Plaza, all peacefully done, but that made a very powerful message,” said Michael Hardy, general counsel and executive vice president of Sharpton’s National Action Network.

Protests Following Killing of George Floyd

Like New York City mayors before him, Bill de Blasio has stood by the NYPD during the present moment of anger at the NYPD and police brutality. He described their response as “restrained” 37 times over the course of the first week of protests. Even when his own staffers offered eyewitness accounts of peaceful protesters being attacked, de Blasio appeared to side with the NYPD.

“I want minimum intervention, minimum force, lots of restraint,” the mayor said at a June 5th press conference. “That's what we're seeing. And I've heard plenty of examples of police negotiating, communicating, and getting it right. And that's what we want to see in New York City.”

In a video message to NYPD officers published on Twitter and Facebook, NYPD Chief of Department Terrance Monahan offered his own justification for the department’s use of force. 

“The attacks on our police officers the stresses that you were under every day to bring order to the streets,” Monahan said. “We did what needed to be done to bring this city back.”

But Hardy, with the National Action Network, pushed back on Monahan’s logic.

“If your reaction to the violence is to be violent, that’s not gonna help solve anything,” Hardy said. “If you’re engaging, in more democratically motivated policing, then you try to come up with tactics that will deescalate and not escalate.”

Andy Lanset, WNYC’s Director of Archives, assisted in production of this report.