When an event at Manhattan’s Union Square Park where he planned to give away video game systems deteriorated into mayhem, drawing a crowd estimated at several thousand young people, a well-known social media streamer was charged with inciting a riot.
Kai Carlo Cenat III, a livestreamer, was anticipated to face charges for unlawful assembly and maybe additional felonies in addition to the riot count, Police Department Chief Jeffrey Maddrey said at a news conference late on Friday.
According to officials, the incident, which started just after 3 p.m. and was essentially ended by 6 p.m., resulted in 65 arrests, over half of which were of teenagers, injuries to some of the crowd members and policemen, as well as damage to food carts, police cars, and storefronts.
“It was out of control. We struggled for a time to contain it. At one of two news conferences held after the park had been cleaned up, the official, Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, remarked, “And a lot of young people got hurt.” He was speaking in front of a plaza that was filled with garbage.
At 4 p.m., Mr. Cenat and another streamer named Fanum had made preparations to distribute PlayStation 5 consoles in the park. The two belong to the streaming collective AMP, which has throngs of followers on Twitch and YouTube. The YouTube channel of Mr. Cenat has more than 3.6 million subscribers.
According to Chief Maddrey, the event was unplanned and took place without a license from the city. Around noon, he said, a social media post informed the police of the gathering. He claimed that by 3 p.m., “the post had gone viral.”
He claimed that at that time, “the event grew exponentially, rapidly, vast.”
Young people quickly filled the park to capacity and overflowed onto the nearby streets and sidewalks, where they impeded traffic and obstructed pedestrians. Union Square Greenmarket, which is well-known, closed early. Trains on the subway started avoiding the Union Square station.
The Police Department started a degree 4 mobilization, its maximum degree of response, as 4 o’clock approached and the crowd grew agitated. Some of the audience remained largely calm, but others started to become unruly. The chief claimed that a group of individuals invaded a construction site before starting tossing rocks, bottles, and construction items at one another.
“You had people walking around with shovels, axes and other tools of the construction trade,” he said, adding that others had been lighting fireworks and tossing them toward officers and one another.
The chaos grew as the giveaway time passed without happening as planned.
Fireworks, a computer, water bottles, basketballs, and basketballs flew through the audience. As police moved in to make arrests, one group of young people resisted the riot shield-wielding officers. A group of almost 200 individuals gathered around a flagpole in the middle of the park chanted foul language at the cops. Images from the situation showed individuals boarding cars entrapped in the throng.
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