Seymour Pine (July 21, 1919 - September 2, 2010) was a deputy American police inspector with New York City Police (NYPD) who served in the 1941-1976 army. As deputy inspector, he led a police attack at the Stonewall Inn, which occurred in the early hours of the morning of June 28, 1969. The resulting Stonewall riots helped spark the development of a newborn gay rights movement in the United States.
Video Seymour Pine
Biography
Pine was born on July 21, 1919, in Manhattan and attended Brooklyn College, where he graduated in 1941. He joined the NYPD after graduating from college, but was shortly registered to serve in the United States Army, where he saw tasks in North Africa. and in Europe. After completing his military service, Pine returned to the army and was appointed to the rank of deputy inspector in the late 1960s.
Pine died at the age of 91, on September 2, 2010, at a life assisted facility in Whippany, New Jersey. He survived by two sons and seven grandchildren. His wife, former Judith Handler, died in 1987.
Maps Seymour Pine
Stonewall
The NYPD regularly raided such clubs, tried to combat prostitution and organized crime activities, and Pine said at the time that three other bars in Greenwich Village had been raided within two weeks before the Stonewall Inn attack. In such raids in gay bars, transsexuals will routinely be arrested and are common to officers to harass other customers. When the June 28 attack was initiated by his superiors, Deputy Inspector Pine was the deputy commander of the squad and he led a group of eight officers. The Stonewall Inn belonged to the Mafia and there were 200 people in it when the attack began shortly after Midnight with plainclothes officers who filed a search warrant, citing claims that liquor was being sold illegally in the bar. Although orders for all customers line up and provide identification, some customers refuse and some transvestites refuse to undergo "anatomy checks". When news of the attack spread, hundreds of protesters gathered outside Stonewall. After the police tried to place a woman inside a police car, the crowd was confronted by officers who returned to the club to avoid the increasingly challenging crowd. After a couple in the crowd tried to set the club on fire, pulled the meter parked out of the sidewalk and tried to use it to smash the door, and threw objects like bottles, garbage cans and coins at the clerk, extra reinforcements calling, took over an hour to recover order and disperse the crowd that gathered around the Stonewall Inn. That night, four police officers were injured and 13 arrests were made, in addition to several cases of liquor that had been seized because the inn did not have a liquor license. The unrest continued for several nights, with a crowd of thousands. In his 2004 book Stonewall: Riot Triggering the Gay Revolution, David Carter describes Stonewall's unrest as "for what gay movement the fall of the Bastille was to release the French Revolution."
Pine retired from the New York City Police Department in 1976. In the following years, Carter denied the notion that Pine was a homophobic, saying that "I think he really follows orders, not personal prejudice against gay people". In a 2004 program held at the New York Historical Society, Pine admitted that officers were "certainly prejudiced... but did not know what gay people were." He also confirmed the raids at Stonewall as a routine way of fighting organized crime and noted that catching gay people was an easy way for officers to increase their number of arrests since, at least until that night, "They never gave you trouble." He then told Carter that "If what I do helps gay people, then I'm happy". As quoted in The Advocate in 2009, Pine says that "I do not think dislike gay people have anything to do with it" and asked on Brian Lehrer Show about the justification for the attack it replied that "When we take the action we took that night, we are on the right side.We will never do anything unattended from federal authorities and state authorities."
Interviews with Pine and other eyewitnesses about the incident at Stonewall Inn were included in the 2010 Stonewall Uprising documentary produced and directed by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner.
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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