The Tompkins Square Park Police Riot

On the night of August 6, 1988, a rally against a new curfew in Tompkins Square Park turned into hours of street violence in the East Village. The local community board had pushed the NYC Parks Department to impose a 1 a.m. curfew that June, aimed at clearing the park's homeless encampments and open drug dealing, and Captain Gerald McNamara's 9th Precinct was sent in to enforce it. When protesters marched through St. Mark's Place that evening, officers charged the crowd near the park, and the melee spread through the surrounding blocks until about 6 a.m. the next morning. Thirty-eight people were injured, nine were arrested, and more than 100 brutality complaints followed, a toll big enough that the police commissioner publicly admitted his own department had rioted.