1991 Washington, D.C. riot

The 1991 Washington, D.C. riot, sometimes referred to as the Mount Pleasant riot or Mount Pleasant Disturbance, occurred in May 1991, when rioting broke out in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C. in response to a police officer having shot a Salvadoran man in the chest following a Cinco de Mayo celebration.

Mount Pleasant is a Ward 1 neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the ward that former mayor Marion Barry called the "inner city ward" because it touches none of the surrounding suburbs. Located north of Adams Morgan and west of Columbia Heights, the neighborhood was one of the most diverse in the nation, with a population of roughly equal proportions of black, Hispanic, and white residents, along with Vietnamese, Laotians, Indians, and South Korean ones.

On Sunday evening, May 5, 1991, following a Cinco de Mayo street celebration in nearby Adams Morgan, Angela Jewell, a rookie Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department police officer of African American descent tried to arrest a Salvadoran man, Daniel Enrique Gomez for disorderly conduct in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Witnesses disputed whether the drunken man came at her with a hunting knife, but the result was that she shot and wounded the man in the chest.

A Salvadorian man was shot and left paralyzed. While he was handcuffed, crowds of youths, most in their teens and twenties, formed and started to attack the police. Around 400 youths fought running street battles with the police for several hours, late into the night. Police cars were torched and several stores looted. The District’s mayor, Sharon Pratt Dixon, told the police to hold back from making arrests for looting because she feared it would antagonize the crowd and lead to more violence. District law enforcement officials had problems massing enough riot police to control the riot because of a lack of communication equipment. Due to these problems, they had an uncoordinated response when the rioting first began. Because of this poor initial response, several police officers were left to fend for themselves as the mob attacked them and had to wait to be rescued by other officers. The violence continued until early in the morning, when the crowds began to break up because of rain.

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