The Doorman unfolds against a backdrop of police killings of Black men, events that trigger mass protests and expose the systemic racism present in New York life. These fictional shootings draw on a well-documented pattern of lethal force by the NYPD that stretches back more than a century. Understanding this history clarifies why the novel’s characters respond so differently to the same events, and why the protests carry such combustible energy.

Police violence against communities of color in New York has deep institutional roots. During the 1964 Harlem riot, off-duty Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan shot and killed 15-year-old James Powell, sparking six days of unrest across Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Decades later, in February 1999, plainclothes officers from the NYPD’s Street Crime Unit fired 41 shots at Amadou Diallo, an unarmed 23-year-old Guinean immigrant, in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building, killing him. According to reporting by The New York Times, all four officers were acquitted of all charges in 2000. The Diallo case became a national symbol of racist policing and the dangers of aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics. In the novel, Pavone similarly depicts a police killing in a building lobby on 57th Street that catalyzes outrage, and a second killing in Harlem that intensifies the crisis to a breaking point.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s tenure amplified these tensions. In September 1992, before becoming mayor, Giuliani addressed an estimated 10,000 off-duty officers at a rally outside City Hall that devolved into what journalists described as a police riot, with officers blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and using racist slurs against Mayor David Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor. As mayor, Giuliani championed “broken windows” policing and publicly defended officers in disputed shootings, fostering what critics called a culture of impunity. The novel echoes this dynamic when board members insist on hiring armed security during the protest, an impulse Julian Sonnenberg resists by warning that such guards might “gun down some unarmed Black men, on our sidewalk, which we paid them to do” (78). His hypothetical mirrors the real pattern of privatized and state-sanctioned force converging on Black people.

The novel also alludes directly to more recent cases that fueled the Black Lives Matter movement. Chicky recalls a previous march protesting “the DA’s failure to indict a white guy who’d choke-held a Black man to death on the subway” (9), a clear reference to the 2023 killing of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old unhoused man who was restrained in a fatal chokehold by a fellow passenger on the subway. That case provoked demonstrations across the city and reignited debates about violence and the criminalization of mental illness. The earlier weekend shooting on 57th Street, meanwhile, recalls the 2014 death of Eric Garner, who was killed by an NYPD officer’s prohibited chokehold on Staten Island while gasping “I can’t breathe,” a phrase that became a rallying cry after a grand jury declined to indict the officer. Pavone situates this legacy as an active force shaping how residents, staff, and protesters navigate a single night in New York, revealing that the violence of policing and the violence of inequality are inseparable.