by Nick Taylor
We went out this afternoon to look around. Television coverage has shown us New York City streets in chaos. During the day marches, including those here in New York, are peaceful.
But when night falls, looters and thieves take over from peaceful marchers. Like most Americans, we have watched and agonized about this since Memorial Day, when George Floyd died in Minneapolis with a police officer’s knee on his neck for almost nine minutes.
The large gatherings give the bad actors cover. Like politicians, the looters and thieves never let a crisis go to waste. It’s organized street crime. They rush in with crowbars, smash windows, rob stores, and throw their loot into cars and vans summoned by phone or text or social media. Luxury goods, mobile phone, and liquor stores seem to be the main targets, but they’re not the only ones. Bodegas that often are the only shops that serve their neighborhoods have been victims, too.
Just smashing things sometimes is the only object. Destruction for the thrill of it. Pick up a Citi Bike and throw it through a window. Turn over a trash can and set it on fire. The chaos aids the looters.
Surveillance cameras, which might be a small deterrent in normal times, are as good as blind. Everyone wears masks these days to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The thieves and window smashers look like health conscious citizens until they take out their crowbars.
We hear helicopters all the time now in our part of New York City. On Sunday night the looters hit stores in Soho. Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a curfew in response, from 11 p.m. Monday to 5 the next morning. The thieves didn’t wait until 11. They started as soon as it got dark, hitting stores on Broadway and in the East Village and as close as Bleecker Street near Sixth Avenue. Where were the police? In the television coverage, they looked outmaneuvered by kids on bikes and skateboards. In some cases, local citizens were the only thing standing between the thieves and the stores they wanted to hit.
After the looting we saw a sign on Bleecker Street for a recall of de Blasio. People support the protesters and are furious about the looting.
As we walked from street to street in the West Village, we saw plywood-covered windows and men with saws and nail guns hard at work boarding up restaurants and retail stores.
Against this backdrop, a group of 50 or 100 protesters marched down Seventh Avenue chanting, “Hands up. Don’t shoot.” They knelt in the street and police cars shielded them from traffic.
Governor Andrew Cuomo said in his Tuesday news conference the police were so poorly deployed against the nighttime looting he wanted to send in the National Guard, but the mayor declined the offer. De Blasio moved the curfew start up to 8 p.m. and the NYPD announced a ban on vehicles below 96th Street. But if the looters continue to rule the streets and the police stay absent, the governor may have no choice.
This tweet appeared right before the 8 p.m. curfew.
