2023 Podcasts

10-85

Lee, Yuchen; Fansa, Lina

Over 400 police officers clashed with 200 civilians on the streets of the Lower East Side, in the late hours of August 6, 1988.

Ralph Grasso, a retired NYPD officer, take us back to one of the most notorious nights in New York city history, the Tompkins Square park riot. Months after the riot, Ralph himself was in deep trouble.

In this episode, we hear an NYPD’s perspective of what happened the night policing and crowd control methods changed forever. It was a year where hand held video cameras were used, where hours of footage captured behaviour that left a stain on the NYPD for a long time to come.