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The Borough Park Riot (or Protest)
April 6th, 2006

The streets of Borough Park were calm last night but debate continues who over-reacted and how – and whether the Hasidim who poured into the street Tuesday night after the arrest of an elderly man were rioters, protestors or kids celebrating Passover early. (Note: This is not the way the holiday is typically observed).

The News and the Post condemn the rioting (or protesting) and praise the police. “There is no place in New York City for the type of hooliganism that swept Borough Park, Brooklyn, on Tuesday night,” the News says. “Neither is there any place for cries of ‘Nazi Germany! Nazi Germany!’…. If anything, the people of Borough Park should be thanking the 66th Precinct for making their neighborhood far safer.”

“For hours on end, hundreds of people ignored orders to disperse and go home. Instead, they lit bonfires in the middle of busy 16th Avenue, torched one police car, smashed the windows of another and angrily taunted cops,” the Post writes. “Police showed admirable restraint in the face of such provocation.”

But some disagree. City Councilmember Simcha Felder charged that Joseph Eposito, the department’s highest ranking uniformed officer, screamed, Get the f- – -ing Jews out of here!” “”We will bring witnesses upon witnesses upon witnesses to confirm what he said,” Felder told the Post. ”If they try to push this under the rug, they are in for a rude awakening.”

“How about suspending [Esposito] until they have investigators question all of the people who heard him say it,” writes the Yeshiva World Blog.

To Assemblymember Dov Hikind, the police abuses went beyond one man’s alleged comments. “This is not the intifada in Ramallah in the Middle East …. There were young people out of control and, unfortunately, the [police] tactics used literally contributed to a situation that became more out of control,” he said (ignoring the fact that some critics say the same thing about Israeli tactics in Ramallah).

But others claim the protesters got off easily. “City officials were facing questions … about why only three people were arrested in the confrontation,” the Times observed.

And in the News, Councilmember Charles Barron said, “If that was in a black community there would have been mass arrests and there would have been mass butt-whipping.”

In Talking Points Memo, Joshua Micah Marshall quotes the Times account, which said that a routine traffic stop had “escalated into protest.” He writes, “’Escalated into a protest’? That combination of diction and grammar seems a tad strained, doesn’t it? …. Once you set a police car on fire, isn’t that a riot?” (P.S. Today’s Sun describes the event as a “small riot.”)

By Gail Robinson on April 6, 2006, 10:49 am
In category: Civil Rights, Crime & Safety, Gotham City | No Comments »

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