BOTTLE BARRAGE PELTS POLICE
Taunts & insults amid alert of Harlem gunfire
A mob of revelers hurled bottles and insults at cops who tried to break up a massive street party in Harlem following reports of gunfire early Sunday, according to video and law-enforcement sources.
A clip posted on Instagram shows several NYPD SUVs with flashing lights backing up along Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard as people in the crowd yell, advance toward the cops and throw bottles, including an empty 1.75-liter liquor bottle snatched off the sidewalk.
“Get the f--k out of here!” one man screams repeatedly.
Amid the turmoil, several cops in white shirts, typically worn highranking officers, could be seen standing together near the vehicles.
Other videos, apparently shot earlier, show people taunting the NYPD by launching aerial fireworks from atop a van at the corner of West 132nd Street and dancing in front of a police cruiser.
“Police can’t stop s- -t!” someone says at one point.
The chaos — which left the intersection strewn with trash — lasted several hours before the mob was dispersed with no arrests or injuries, sources said.
The NYPD said a ShotSpotter sensor — part of a system that alerts police to potential gunfire — was triggered at around 3:45 a.m. at West 133rd Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard.
Seven spent cartridges from a .45-caliber handgun and one from a .380-caliber pistol were later recovered, but it was not clear exactly where, sources said.
One cop described the situation as “complete lawlessness.” “I’m angry about it,” the cop said. “But then other cops are like, ‘Why do anything? If you get out of the car and you do something, you could get suspended or modified or get arrested if you get into [it] with this person and put your knee on them.’ ”
“But I’m thinking about the innocent people who are driving by or walking, coming and going to work . . . At one point, you gotta stand up. Enough is enough.”
Michelle Smalls, owner of the Michelle Smalls Realty brokerage and the High Maintenance Hair Spa at West 132nd Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, said she had been out of town at the time of the uproar but was “appalled” when she learned about it.
“It’s one thing to have fun, but throwing bottles at the police is totally unacceptable,” she said. “I understand them getting together and enjoying themselves, but when
they resort to violence it’s not fun anymore.”
“I don’t find it funny. I don’t find it cute. It’s ignorant.”
A neighborhood resident who identified himself as Marcus, 22, said he was attending friend’s birthday barbecue on West 132nd Street when the cops showed up with helmets and riot gear, “ready to go to battle.”
“Well, a lot of us took it like, ‘F- -k this, we aren’t doing nothing wrong and you’re not gonna take our block,’ ” he said.
“I didn’t throw anything, but I was pissed off, yelling and screaming, and one of my friends threw an empty vodka bottle that landed right in front of one of the cruisers. After that, I ran away because I didn’t want to get arrested with any of the kids that were doing the throwing.”
Another resident, who gave his name only as Darryl, said he was returning from a party elsewhere and “saw a conflict between the black people and police.”
“The cops got out of their cars and got into a military formation, lined up and ready on command to go and rush everything,” he said.
“That scares people, so everybody just came on them as one . . . The black people wanted the cops to know that this is our neighborhood and you’re not going to intimidate us.”
‘Complete lawlessness,” one cop termed the incident in Harlem in the early hours Sunday — and it’s fast becoming an apt description of much of the city. Officers responded to an electronic ShotSpotter alert just before 4 a.m., and discovered a block party still raging. Worse, the crowd attacked the police, with members screaming obscenities as they hurled bottles and other debris at the cruisers.
The NYPD showed tremendous restraint, perhaps too much — retreating vans down Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and avoiding arrests or injuries as it dispersed the mob over several hours. How many innocents were at risk in the interim? And how are police to reverse the surge in shootings when they meet this kind of reception?
Eleven New Yorkers were shot across 12 hours that night, with several of the victims refusing to cooperate in any investigation. And that doesn’t include the couple gunned down with an AR-15-style rifle Saturday afternoon on an East New York stoop.
That’s over 80 people shot in a week, with at least six fatalities.
Other signs of disorder are more mundane, like the assaults on the barricades that close off roads under Mayor de Blasio’s “open streets” effort. Drivers blowing through those barriers are plainly putting innocents at risk while showing utter contempt for the law.
As are the people shooting off fireworks at all hours of the night, with cops evidently ordered not to interfere.
Indeed, “don’t interfere” seems the slogan for every city authority these days. Police took troubled vagrant Matthew Mishefski to Mt. Sinai Hospital on Saturday . . . after he started running around naked in Washington Square Park and got into a fight with two other men.
But he’d been camped out in the fenced-off fountain for a month, amassing a living-room worth of furniture. Is it really a coincidence that he was finally hauled in only after he made the front page of The Post? Where were ThriveNYC and all the other city mental-health programs all those weeks?
This is a guy who answers only when addressed as “Jesus Christ Lord Saviour,” yet the system fails to protect him or the public with mandatory treatment. Indeed, he was discharged Sunday morning, returned to the park, stripped again and got hauled back to Mt. Sinai. He may be out again by the time you read this.
The city seems not only to be increasingly out of control, but to be led by “authorities” who don’t care (or dare) to restore basic order. New York has recovered from far worse — but only after choosing leadership committed to putting public safety first.