IN Bushwick the arrests peaked at about 1:30 a.m. By then there were two shifts’ worth of cops—4 p.m. to midnight and midnight to 8 a.m.—out on the streets. The Eight-Three’s holding cells, which were designed to accommodate one prisoner, had upwards of ten in each. When they couldn’t squeeze in another body, cops handcuffed prisoners to radiators, to benches, to tables, to one another. (One popular method entailed cuffing five of them in a line, then cuffing the last guy to the first guy’s ankles.) The rest were stuffed into a small courtyard behind the station house.
The property room was overflowing with merchandise. “P. C. Richard’s was empty compared to that room,” remembers one officer. “Sears, Roebuck? Forget about it.” When the room was full, goods were redirected to a designated area outside the station where an officer stood guard.
By 2 a.m. the dispatcher was reporting only 10-30s and 10-13s—robberies in progress and officers needing assistance. Several cops remember being instructed to stop arresting looters. Even though they weren’t hanging around to process their collars, the arrests were taking them off the streets for too long. Besides, the station house was running out of room for prisoners.
Instead, cops cracked their shins or gave them “turbans,” copspeak for a bloody head wrapped in a towel or bandage. “You just wanted to stop the riot, so you beat up the looters with ax handles and nightsticks,” recalls Robert Knightly, a bearded, mild-mannered
veteran of the Eight-Three who is now a defense attorney for Legal Aid. “You beat ’em up and left them in the street. You catch them looting, you just smacked them down and left them.”
Knightly chased one looter who was carrying a love seat. He caught up to the perp and knocked him down. The looter popped right up, as if attached to a spring. “I’m not like these people. I’ve got a job,” he barked. “Oh, yeah?” Knightly answered. “Is today your day off?”
The station house was in chaos. When cops needed a breather, they’d drive a few blocks toward the Queens border, which was eerily quiet.
Several officers recollect being told to remove their shields and nameplates. The shields gave the looters a target to shoot at in the darkness. As for the nameplates, “They wanted this thing over as quickly as possible, and they didn’t want anyone worrying about being identified,” says one cop. The officer who had taken the Louisville Slugger broke it on a looter and yanked a metal riser out of the stairwell of an abandoned building to use as his new nightstick. It got him through the remainder of the night.
One cop remembers a looter running around beneath a building like an outfielder trying to get under a fly ball. “We were saying ‘No, no way he’s going to do this.’” He did. A love seat came crashing down on top of him from a couple of floors up. The looters were attacking one another too. According to one police report, a man was loading a van with stolen merchandise at Gates and Broadway. He offered an onlooker a hundred dollars to help. The onlooker declined. But as soon as the van was full, the onlooker stabbed the driver, took the keys to the van, and drove off.
Officer Frank Cammarata remembers chasing a looter up to the roof of a six-story furniture store with a few other officers. One thing led to another, and the looter went over the edge. A tree broke his fall. He looked up from the pavement, gave the officers the finger, and hobbled away.
By 3 a.m. the only hospital in the neighborhood, Wyckoff Heights, was a madhouse. A police administrator was stationed at the registrar’s desk, filling out police reports while the registrar did intakes. So many people had cut themselves on broken glass that the hospital was running out of suture material. When officers came by to drop off the injured or simply to wash up and rest for a few minutes, nurses gave them packets of suture threads to keep in their pockets in case they needed them later.
Carl St. Martin, a medical student who lived on Bushwick’s Greene Avenue, was helping stitch people up. A trim but muscular young man who wore a pooka shell necklace, a thin beard, and a full but tame Afro, St. Martin was home studying for his medical boards when the lights went out. Like Sekzer, he thought it was a fuse. “Then I heard noises in the street, people yelling. Within a matter of minutes people were going up to Bushwick Avenue to get stuff,” he says. “The next thing I knew people were walking down my block with TVs on their backs. I remember one man carrying a sofa all by himself.”
He also noticed that a lot of people were cut up from the glass. So he decided to walk up to Wyckoff Heights, where the overwhelmed emergency room was happy to put him to work. He sewed people up until close to dawn.