NYPD Eyes Manhattan ‘Frozen Zones’ Over Potential Election Riots

NEW YORK CITY — Parts of Manhattan could be designated as “frozen zones” to curb large-scale looting and other chaos if it unfolds Election Night.

Top NYPD officials on Tuesday confirmed plans for car- and pedestrian-free zones but stressed they don’t anticipate putting them in motion.

“We do not expect them to happen,” Terence Monahan, the city’s chief of department, said of outbreaks of widespread looting.

“We did not expect to see any repeat of what we saw at the end of May and into June,” he said.

But Monahan said he understood concerns of Election Night unrest that prompted business owners across the city to board up their windows.

Storefronts along the city’s iconic Fifth Avenue are sheathed in plywood, as are stretches near Union Square and the Financial District, among many other locations.

Looting across Manhattan and The Bronx unfolded in late May and early June amid massive protests over the killing of George Floyd. Those demonstrations continued peacefully for weeks — and arguably never really stopped — while looting ceased.

But images of looting in New York City played on repeat in conservative media and fueled a perception perpetuated by President Donald Trump that the city is in the grip of chaos and anarchy.

Likewise, images of boarded-up storefronts before the election spread far and wide in national media. Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday, when asked what the shuttered windows showed about confidence in the city and its police, warned against “reading more into them than is there.”

“The frustrations that were unleashed in the course of the spring, were based in the coronavirus, and then obviously for a lot of people, were about the injustices in this country,” he said. “Some other people were just committing acts of violence and crime, but that was an extraordinary moment. That is not a moment, I believe, we'll see repeated in the future.”