At around 12:31 AM today, June 9, the New York Police Department (NYPD) shut down a Puerto Rican Day afterparty at Bushwick venue Mood Ring.
A video recording was posted to X this morning by independent reporter Talia Jane showing a brigade of police attempting to clear the crowd. Multiple cops can be seen shoving partygoers to the ground. At around the 1:13 mark, a taser can be heard in the background. The incident resulted in at least one arrest and one hospitalization, Jane reported.
BOJAQ was DJing inside when the cops came. “We had no clue it was this crazy until the white shirt cops stormed inside and told the owner came and told me to shut it down,” he told Brooklyn Magazine.
Lancer Casem, a regular patron and promoter at Mood Ring, was sitting inside one of the booths when the police showed up. She said the owner, Bowen, told her the police were responding to a noise complaint. “Mood Ring has had noise complaints before, and [the cops] have never dealt with it like this,” Casem said. “They stormed the dancefloor and kicked everyone out of the club.”
“No one was fighting or doing anything wrong. Mood Ring last year was actually crazier because they had a full patio. Something is so off this year… I’m anxious for pride now, to be honest,” she added. According to BOJAQ, the afterparty is an annual event that Mood Ring has hosted for the last four years. This year, a crowd was expected to form outside of the bar after the parade on Knickerbocker ended.
Mobéy Lola Irrizary, a traditional Puerto Rican musician, was playing drums and singing Bomba—the oldest African-derived genre of music and dance in Puerto Rico—at the time of the intrusion. They said there were about 50 to 100 officers who came to disperse the crowd, which was made up of queer, Black Puerto Ricans, and Caribbean people.
“They didn’t give us a verbal warning,” Irrizary said. “Nobody came to just talk to us and ask us to stop.”
Monique Parker was outside dancing and singing along to the music before “out of nowhere,” the police arrived and began “pushing us to get out of the way.” She said there was no communication between the venue and NYPD, which she felt would have de-escalated the situation. Brooklyn Magazine reached out to Mood Ring, but the venue replied with no comment.
“They came in like we were animals,” Parker said. “They were the cowboys and we were the herd.”
Parker claimed one police officer squeezed her arm as she was trying to leave and distance herself from this situation. “I have a son. I don’t want to be here either. I’m not trying to do this with y’all,” she recalls. “They made a choice to be violent for no reason.”
The incident comes a year and a half after Eric Adams dismantled the M.A.R.C.H. police task force—known for raiding music venues in a way Adams himself admitted was “abusive” and “intrusive”—and on the heels of several recent complaints of NYPD aggressively overpolicing venues and bars catering to marginalized communities. A new program called “C.U.R.E.” was meant to be a “solution-oriented” replacement. Jeffrey Maddrey, NYPD Chief of Department, insisted “enforcement will be a last resort.”
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