Police in New York took several youths into custody, some of them carrying illegal weapons according to the community's own leadership, after banned fireworks went off around the Sikh Cultural Society gurdwara in Richmond Hill, Queens, on the night of Sunday, November 8 — the night the neighbourhood was celebrating Diwali and Bandi Chhor Divas. A New York Police Department officer was injured during the disorder, the society's president, Jatinder Singh, has said.
Source: The Punjab Standard
The NYPD is hunting two men who were caught on camera throwing a lit firework at a 28-year-old officer who was managing a crowd near the corner of 101st Avenue and 118th Street at about 9:19 p.m., police said. According to the police account, one man set the firework alight and his companion hurled it, and both men then fled north on 118th Street.
The officer was taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center and is in stable condition. He escaped burns but needed treatment for ear pain, a law enforcement source told the local news site QNS. The police notice about the incident made no mention of the gurdwara, which sits a few blocks up the same street.
Police are treating the firework attack as a case of reckless endangerment and a reward of up to $3,500 is on offer for information. In the interest of accuracy, one limit of the story so far should be clear: the NYPD has not yet released the number of arrests made that night or the types of weapons the society's president spoke of, so those details remain the community leadership's account, not a police-confirmed figure.
An unconditional apology from the gurdwara
At a press conference, Jatinder Singh offered the injured officer an unconditional apology and asked for strict action against the youths involved. He said the gurdwara had assured the authorities that fireworks would stay off the celebrations, but a few youngsters chose to defy the ban anyway.
The community may be large in number here, but that does not give us the right to violate the law of the land.
Singh said the trouble was not limited to his gurdwara — all four gurdwaras in Richmond Hill saw similar scenes that night, he said. Such conduct, he argued, was damaging how Punjabis and Indians abroad are seen, and a small group could cost others their chances. As he spoke, a youth roared past the venue on a motorcycle; the president said that was exactly the problem, that the younger generation was not listening to its elders. He also credited the US police for handling the youths lawfully, remarking that police in India could have been far harsher.
A festival night in Little Punjab
Bandi Chhor Divas, marked alongside Diwali, recalls Guru Hargobind Sahib's release from Gwalior Fort, and thousands of devotees came to the gurdwara for the occasion. Fireworks, however, are banned in New York City, and that ban — not the festival — is what the night's arrests and the injury to the officer turned on.
The Sikh Cultural Society gurdwara was set up in 1972 and was the city's first major gurdwara, in the Richmond Hill neighbourhood known as Little Punjab for its large Punjabi community. For that community — families who have built their lives, businesses and places of worship in Queens over five decades — the president's public apology was also a defence of the neighbourhood's standing with the city around it.
What happens next: the NYPD's search for the two men seen throwing the firework continues, with the reward in place, and the department is still to publish its own account of how many people were taken into custody on November 8 and on what charges. For Punjabi readers in Queens and across the diaspora, the case is a reminder that festival nights are policed nights too — and that the community's own leadership is now publicly asking for the law to be followed, and enforced.