How does this guy still have a career? And, for that matter, how is there still a New York Police Department?

Radley Balko carries the story in an editorial at [wapo] As Balko says, this is Nat Hentoff telling the tale at the Cato institute: [cato]

It was one of the biggest riots in New York City history.

As many as 10,000 demonstrators blocked traffic in downtown Manhattan on Sept. 16, 1992. Reporters and innocent bystanders were violently assaulted by the mob as thousands of dollars in private property was destroyed in multiple acts of vandalism. The protesters stormed up the steps of City Hall, occupying the building. They then streamed onto the Brooklyn Bridge, where they blocked traffic in both directions, jumping on the cars of trapped, terrified motorists. Many of the protestors were carrying guns and openly drinking alcohol.

Yet the uniformed police present did little to stop them. Why? Because the rioters were nearly all white, off-duty NYPD officers. They were participating in a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association demonstration against Mayor David Dinkins’ call for a Civilian Complaint Review Board and his creation earlier that year of the Mollen Commission, formed to investigate widespread allegations of misconduct within the NYPD.

In the center of the mayhem, standing on top of a car while cursing Mayor Dinkins through a bullhorn, was mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani.

So that’s 10,000 cops demonstrating against the mayor for trying to have a complaint review board; i.e.: regulation of mis-behaving cops triggers a great big mis-behavior. These are the “law and order” boys.

Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin described the racist conduct in chilling detail:

“The cops held up several of the most crude drawings of Dinkins, black, performing perverted sex acts,” he wrote. “And then, here was one of them calling across the top of his beer can held to his mouth, ‘How did you like the n*****s beating you up in Crown Heights?’”

The off-duty cops were referring to a severe beating Breslin suffered while covering the 1991 Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn.

Breslin continued: “Now others began screaming … ‘How do you like what the n*****s did to you in Crown Heights?’

“ ‘Now you got a n****r right inside City Hall. How do you like that? A n****r mayor.’

“And they put it right out in the sun yesterday in front of City Hall,” Breslin wrote. “We have a police force that is openly racist …”

They’re leaping out of their chairs to talk about how “blue lives matter” but that’s where the police unions are ready to take things if they can’t find a palatable excuse for acting up.

Giuliani never condemned the riots, the signs or the racist cops. He rode the wave of support from police and law-and-order voters into the mayor’s mansion. When his own campaign produced a report criticizing him for egging on the cops and then acquiescing to them after the fact, he ordered the report destroyed.

In a decent society, no politician would hire that guy as a lawyer. In a decent society, a police department that rioted against its civilian leaders would suffer consequences for doing so.