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 Kyle Rittenhouse verdict. Unfortunately, though, many of them are anything but outsiders.
He was commenting on the crews who in the name of “justice” 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 other protesters gathered outside Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, where the Nets played the Orlando Magic Friday night, 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.”
They may not be neighbors of those they plagued this time, but plenty of the nastiest protesters do live in 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 a series of other messages, Rahman allegedly boasted to Mattis about the destruction she was causing that night as protests raged in Brooklyn and across the city.
- 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.
Though her parents owned a $1.8 million co-op with river views on the Upper East Side and a pricey second home in Connecticut’s Litchfield County, notes seized after her arrest outline a “revolutionary strategy” that cites bloody Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as well as Leon Trotsky 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 felony assault and obstruction for her alleged attack on an NYPD officer in an anti-cop protest in response to the Philadelphia police shooting death of an armed black man. According to a criminal complaint, Haviland had bear-hugged a separately charged defendant — Maria Valenzuela Silva — as a cop was attempting to place her under arrest for making graffiti.
This is just a taste. Hundreds of New Yorkers were arrested for roles in last year’s violent protests and riots.
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.