Home-Grown Pro Rioters
Mayor-elect Eric Adams is entirely right to slam the “professional” rioters and anarchists who pour into the city’s streets after events like the Rittenhouse verdict. Sadly, though, many of them are anything but outsiders.
In the name of “justice,” these crews caused chaos across the city. They vandalized vehicles in Queens, even marking a car with handicapped plates with “F–k you” graffiti in black spray paint. They jumped on cars, stole American flags and vandalized innocent strangers’ homes.
Roughly 300 others gathered Friday night outside the Barclays Center, decrying the not-guilty verdict with signs that read: “no justice in the capitalist courts” and “capitalism breeds racist terror.” (Somehow, Rittenhouse is racist for shooting at other white people in self-defense; go figure.)
“They were all male, white, many of them are from outside the city or just recently moved here. I think there is an anarchist group in this city that’s attempted to create violence in cities and make it seem like it’s our neighbors doing it when it’s not,” Adams said. “These are professionals that are coming into our city causing this violence.”
But plenty of the nastiest protesters don’t have to “come in” to New York, as last year taught us.
Lawyers Urooj Rahman and Colinford Mattis — graduates of Fordham and NYU law schools — were both arrested and charged with throwing Molotov cocktails at a police vehicle in Brooklyn during a confrontation between cops and protesters after George Floyd’s death.
“Go burn down 1PP” (One Police Plaza), Mattis wrote to Rahman before their arrest on May 30, 2020. In other messages, Rahman allegedly boasted of the destruction she was causing that night.
Little Red Rioting Hood, Clara Kraebber, the daughter of wealthy Upper East Siders and a former Hunter College HS student, was arrested in September 2020 on felony rioting and misdemeanor graffiti charges. Notes seized after her arrest outline a “revolutionary strategy” that cites bloody Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as inspiration, law-enforcement sources said. Several of her accomplices were also elite New Yorkers.
In October 2020, Claire Haviland of Brooklyn was arrested for an alleged attack on an NYPD officer in an anti-cop protest after a fatal Philadelphia police shooting.
This is just a taste. Last year’s violent protests and riots saw hundreds of New Yorkers arrested.
Adams is certainly right to call this behavior “unacceptable in our city.” Too bad so many of New York’s “professional” rioters are home-grown.