"Suck my d*ck!" The 'riot' in union square.

Photo from a still video by Bruce Schaff

Friday afternoon, a skinny kid with a flat-top haircut sped towards Union Square, along with every NYPD vehicle that wasn’t already there. “Wait so what’s going on?” I asked him. An NY1 camera man had told my friend Julie and I about a riot in Union Square.

“Kaisant from Twitch was giving away Play stations and then there was a riot and the cops came!” he kid yelled as he rushed off.

“Who?”

“Kaisant!! Kaisant!!!”

A croissant started a riot with a video game console? Later, one of the kids took pity on my geriatric ass and patiently held his phone to Kai Cenat’s TikTok so I could take a screen shot of the influencer’s name. Kai Cenat is a 21-year-old with 20 million social media followers. When he announced a PlayStation giveaway, roughly half of them showed up, clearly hopped up on too much sugar, and got rowdy. Look, I’m not saying it was an intelligent thing to do. It was way too many kids; someone could have gotten hurt. They knocked down some construction around the train station and messed up a few cars. But the police response, jeez. 1,000 officers, the maximum level of deployment. Horse cops; police in full riot gear; helicopters; a creepy drone that buzzed overhead, robotically telling the crowd to disperse; Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, looking dour and like he longed for the days when corporal punishment wasn’t frowned upon.

“Suck my dick!!” a teenager yelled at the police line.

Later, Maddrey would solemnly intone, “A 3pm, the Tweet went viral.” As Mikki Halpin observed, Kai Cenat hasn’t Tweeted since mid-July. Just as Facebook has calcified into a platform for Boomer moms to share memes about filling every day with laughter and love or whatever, Twitter is now for middle-aged media dorks to squabble about The New York Times op-ed page (sigh. Guilty as charged).

Clearly, someone with half a brain had told the officers to be careful with 90 million camera phones trained on them. Still, they arrested 65 people, 30 of them juveniles. Julie caught footage of scared looking teenagers, one with his face bloodied, being dragged away. “"He looked younger than me, 13?” a kid who, actually, looked 8 to me, told me about a boy he saw get arrested. And police got caught on video shoving a kid’s face through the back glass of a cab. That should be a hefty lawsuit settlement!