Police Power and Race Riots. Cathy Lisa Schneider

to other cities and attained widespread adoption by 1968.”⁹⁷ The blackout riots hit all neighborhoods in the city simultaneously, which made them extremely hard to police. Riots that begin in one neighborhood can often be contained if a police commissioner chooses to concentrate his forces there. Riots that explode everywhere at once are far more difficult to control. For this reason alone, the 1977 blackout riots were particularly combustible.

      Another defining feature of the blackout riots was that most of those arrested on the first day had established criminal records. It was only in the later hours that residents without any previous criminal record participated in the looting (what Spike Lee remembers ruefully as “Christmas in July”⁹⁸). During the 1960s, riots had followed the opposite course, with the first wave of arrests being individuals previously unknown to police. Moreover, the 1960s rioters had avoided looting stores owned by local blacks or Latinos. The 1977 rioters did not make such distinctions: all stores were hit at the same rate. Lacking insurance for anything but fire, many vulnerable storeowners set their own shops aflame, escalating the destruction of neighborhoods.

      The blackout that triggered the 1977 riots struck during an unusually severe heat wave. The extra energy being used to cool commercial buildings and apartments taxed the poorly maintained circuit breakers, steam units, and service remote controls, none of which had been upgraded or replaced in years. When a bolt of lightning hit the Buchanan South generator, those outside the plant were unable to regulate the distribution of electricity across the units, and the employee ordered to operate the load-dumping equipment turned the master switch the wrong way or “didn’t lift the protective cover from the console before trying to depress the buttons.”⁹⁹ All at once, millions of New Yorkers were without lights and air-conditioning. They took to the streets, fleeing the heat and darkness of their apartments. Some thousand began looting, and others joined in.

      The Bronx and Brooklyn were hit especially hard. A total of 473 stores in the Bronx were damaged and 961 looters arrested. When Mayor Abraham Beame issued the call for policemen to return to duty, he told them to report to whichever precinct was closest. That left the Bronx virtually without police. The Bronx precinct reported a total of 38 officers. “Ten times that number would have been necessary to cope with the spontaneous incidents of looting, fires and attacks on police officers,” the precinct head told Jonathan Mahler.¹⁰⁰

      It was worse in Brooklyn, where a five-mile stretch from Sunset Park through Williamsburg, Bushwick, Brownsville, and Flatbush became the scene of massive looting. “Seven hundred Brooklyn stores were plundered; 1,088 people were arrested.”¹⁰¹ One of the worst-hit neighborhoods was Bushwick, bordering Williamsburg. A decade earlier Bushwick had been a working-class Italian neighborhood. When the Navy Yard closed, a white exodus began. While some Brooklyn neighborhoods received “Model City” status, allowing them to qualify for antipoverty funds, the government had relied on six-year-old census figures marking Bushwick as too rich to qualify. As bulldozers cleared tracts and destroyed tenement housing in East New York, Brownsville, and Williamsburg to make way for new low-income housing projects—many of which were never built—displaced residents found their way to Bushwick. The closing of the beer industry after the Navy Yard accelerated the process of urban decay. Racial tensions between Italians and Puerto Ricans, in particular, sometimes boiled over, as Cuso recalled. In 1977 the Eighty-third police precinct was overwhelmingly white, but those officers policed a neighborhood that was “overwhelmingly black and Hispanic with a narrow strip of Italians along its western edge. ‘Our job was about arresting minorities,’” a police officer from the Eighty-third told Mahler.¹⁰²