Seymour Pine

Seymour Pine (July 21, 1919 – September 2, 2010) was an American deputy police inspector with the

Pine was born on July 21, 1919, in Manhattan and attended Brooklyn College, where he graduated in 1941. He joined the NYPD after graduating from college, but shortly thereafter enlisted to serve in the United States Army, where he saw duty in North Africa and in Europe. After completing his military service, Pine returned to the force and had been elevated to the rank of deputy inspector in the late 1960s.^[1]

Pine died at age 91, on September 2, 2010, at an assisted-living facility in Whippany, New Jersey. He was survived by two sons and seven grandchildren. His wife, the former Judith Handler, had died in 1987.^[1]

Stonewall

The NYPD regularly raided such clubs, seeking to combat

As word of the raid spread, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Stonewall. After the police tried to place a woman in a police car the crowd confronted the officers who went back into the club to avoid the increasingly defiant crowd. After some in the crowd tried to set the club on fire, pulled a parking meter out of the sidewalk and tried to use it to smash down the door, and threw objects such as bottles, garbage cans and coins at the officers, additional reinforcements were called, taking more than an hour to restore order and disperse the crowd that had gathered around the Stonewall Inn.[1] That night, four police officers were injured and there were 13 arrests made, in addition to several cases of liquor that had been seized as the Inn lacked a liquor license.^[2] Rioting continued for several nights, with crowds growing into the thousands. In his 2004 book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, David Carter described the Stonewall riots as being "to the gay movement what the fall of the Bastille is to the unleashing of the French Revolution."^[1]

Pine retired from the New York City Police department in 1976. In the following years, Carter rebutted the notion that Pine was a

Interviews with Pine and other eyewitness accounts of the incident at the Stonewall Inn were included in the 2010 documentary film Stonewall Uprising produced and directed by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner.^[6] "You knew they broke the law, but what kind of law was it?", he claims in the documentary.

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