Documenting the Tompkins Square riot of ’88
NOTEBOOK
BY CLAYTON PATTERSON
Aug. 6, 1988, started hot, as New York City was
struggling with a multiday record heat wave.
Elsa, Duke, our beautiful pit bull, and I were
driving in our pickle-green ’79 Plymouth Fury, a car
we purchased for $25 at a New York Police Department
sale. We were visiting a bar owner Uptown who
was a good customer of our custom Clayton Caps. We
were doing a jacket back for him.
Early in the evening, we had noticed a number of
police cars, sirens blaring, lights fl ashing heading
Downtown. This made me recall seeing a police gathering
early in the week on Second St. just off of Avenue
A. Something was cooking.
It was Sunday night, and I normally went with Peter
Kwaloff a.k.a. Sun PK, R.I.P., to document him
as he got ready for his drag performance at the Pyramid
Whisper Show emcee’ed by Hapi Phace. But today
felt different. I decided to walk up Avenue A to
check things out. This time Elsa, the woman I have
been with since 1972, came with me. Something was
happening in the park. I had my Panasonic AG 155
½-inch consumer-available video camera with me.
I started off documenting the march through the
park, the scene by the band shell, a paddy wagonsized
N.Y.P.D. communication van, cops hanging out,
a couple jumping up and giving each other high fi ves.
Turns out the weekend before a ragtag group of
punks and anarchists hanging around at the front of
the park had had some sort of confl ict with the cops
and the cops came out on the losing end. Captain Mc-
Namara, the Ninth Precinct commanding offi cer, later
made a statement that this could not be allowed to go
unaddressed. In short, he was going to kick some butt
and teach the community a lesson in authority.
To put a plan into effect, he used the Avenue A
block association’s and Community Board 3’s complaints
about the late-night noise coming from Tompkins
Square Park, then got permission from the mayor
to impose a curfew on the park. Add in Mayor Koch
ordering a 1a.m. curfew for Tompkins Square Park
and the game was now in place.
Earlier in the evening, cops became a larger presence.
The cowboys lined up on their horses blocking
Avenue A at Seventh St. Protesters spilled out onto the
street. Then riot cops blocked the entrance to the park
at St. Mark’s Place. Now you had the natural start of
a protest directed at the police — the cops on horses
and the cops blocking the entrance became the focus.
The protesters had a large banner reading, “Gentrifi -
cation Is Class War Fight Back.” Jerry “The Peddler”
Wade, who has real street skills and a reputation of
being able to lead a mob, was in full force.
As the clock struck 1 a.m., riot cops with batons
swinging rushed into the front end of the park along
Avenue A and started to beat people. In a few minutes,
the front of the park was cleared.
Chaos had taken over.
Then, Captain McNamara, hoping to make a grand
entrance, showed up with a patrol car, lights fl ashing,
and stopped in the middle of Avenue A, screaming
into a megaphone to clear the streets. By now he was a
lone fi gure standing in the middle of the intersection,
watching as mounted cops and foot cops chased and
hit anyone who happened to be on the street. In the
part I captured on video, the cops were pushing everyone
up St. Mark’s to First Ave. Cops on horseback
were running over people. Harris, a book peddler,
Ken Fish, who owned a travel agency, was beaten by police on his way home from work during
the Tompkins Square riot on Aug. 6, 1988. In an era before everyone had cell phone cameras,
this image, from the writer’s videotape, shows a bloodied Fish at Avenue A and E. Third St.
was run over. The mom of Chris Flash, The Shadow’s
publisher, was knocked down.
It was at this point that a foot cop, on dark St.
Mark’s, hit a young black woman, cracking her head
open, then taking her white boyfriend down.
Later, Koch and Police Commissioner Ben Ward
called the night a “police riot.” Koch went on to say
he was bothered by all the criminal behavior that so
many cops were engaged in. As the night went on, I
captured many such criminal incidents. My tape got
six cops criminally indicted. More than 100 people
visited the hospital and made complaints against
criminal behavior that cops had engaged in. By the
My videotape was a
game changer
way, I do not believe there was one arrest.
Later, a large number of lawyers took on protesters’
lawsuits and requested copies of my videotapes.
I provided them all for free, of course, with no compensation
for Elsa and me, even though the night cost
the city $2.2 million, as told to me by an attorney
from the Corporation Counsel (New York City Law
Department).
McNamara was no General Patton. He had completely
lost control of the cops, the streets, and apparently
his commander, Chief Darcy, had left the scene.
Paul Garrin, a video artist, had a powerful 20-minute
video of the night of police rage. There is a very
famous shot of cops swinging at him while he’s on top
of a van, with him screaming, “I am getting down! I
PHOTO BY CLAYTON PATTERSON
am getting down!” Police stomped on his video camera,
but Paul was still able to recover the tape intact.
Powerful stuff, and he got it to the TV news stations,
which broadcast the tape continuously all day and
night.
I got Paul’s money shot: As he came down off the
van, a cop grabbed him by the shirt and brutally
slammed him into the Con Ed substation’s brick wall.
Eric Shawn, Fox News’s reporter, heard I had a tape,
and contacted me. He put something on the news and
my world changed in an instant. I had F.B.I., captains
from Internal Affairs, assistant district attorneys and
other law enforcement people banging on my door,
trying to get to my tape. It wasn’t going to happen
the way they were demanding. I ended up in State Supreme
Court. The state gave me a lawyer and I said,
No, I do not want a lawyer, and fi red the lawyer and
stated, I will be pro se. I was sentenced to a continuing
90-day sentence until I gave them my tape.
This may sound crazy, but I had total confi dence
in my very simple but strong argument. Also this was
pre-9/11. Now we have lost so many of our individual
rights. My argument was, “I am an artist. This is my
art and it belongs to me. No you cannot have it.” I
knew once it becomes evidence, it becomes government
property and not mine. This I did not want.
I said they could have a fi rst-generation copy, not
the original, and it was off to the Bronx House of
Detention. There were two prisoners under central
monitoring — myself and Larry Davis. Davis had shot
six cops in the Bronx. “Central monitoring” means
you had to be escorted by a ranking offi cer anywhere
you went. I went to court in a separate bus, shackled
and locked inside a small cage. I was on a hunger
strike. Larry Davis and I both had Lynne Stewart, Bill
Kunstler and Ron Kuby as our lawyers. This team got
Davis off on the charges of shooting the cops. The
Bronx jury believed him when he said he was dealing
drugs with these cops, and they were coming back to
kill him.
In the end, the city got their copies of my tape. But
30 minutes were missing, which led to a whole new
set of engagements.
The cops said they were only trying to enforce a
RIOTS continued on p. 10
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