In Los Angeles, the central Hollywood neighborhood was quietly cleaning up Tuesday morning. A Rite Aid drug store and Pavilions supermarket had been looted the night before. A Starbucks coffee shop and Chipotle restaurant had broken windows.
Protests spread across America’s second-largest city over the past four days, beginning downtown but moving to affluent areas including Beverly Hills and Santa Monica over the weekend. Some business people put signs on their property saying “black owned” or “minority owned” to discourage vandalism. One Mexican restaurant on Melrose Avenue had Black Lives Matter posters in its windows and it appeared to escape damage.
Looters in Los Angeles have been working in teams, driving up in cars without license plates and using social media to communicate about the locations of police and stores that they can swarm.
“When you see the outrage on the streets and the attack on retail establishments, it’s because of the vastly profound economic inequality that exists in the country,” said Anthony Thompson, a professor of clinical law and a founding faculty director of the Center of Race, Inequality and the Law at New York University. “That rage gets focused in the retail sector because of that inequality.”
Macy’s 2.2 million square feet at its Herald Square flagship make it the largest department store in the U.S. Looters invaded it Monday night.
“NYPD responded to the scene and damage has been limited,” said Blair Rosenberg, a Macy’s spokeswoman. “We are grateful none of our employees have been injured. As it relates to re-opening, we’re taking it day by day.”
President Donald Trump, who has seized on the protests to recast himself as a paladin of order, said in tweet Tuesday afternoon that the incursion was reason to bring soldiers into the city.In the morning, a 53-year-old construction worker named Scott Corria was drilling up a ribbon of plywood around the store. He had started putting up the 8-foot-tall pieces Sunday, and now he was repairing some that had been smashed.
“We had the whole thing wrapped,” he said. “They broke through.”
A man in Patagonia shorts pulled up on a bike. John Germain, 55, worked for Lehman Brothers as a banker from 1998 to 2008 and had come from his home in Midtown to check on a favorite place. “It’s a vintage store,” he said. “I wanted to see how it fared through the night.”
“I understand why they’re angry, but I don’t understand the violence,” Germain said. “Everyone got on edge because of coronavirus, and the next thing you know, you just need one more excuse for social unrest.”
By 2:30 p.m., a new layer of plywood near Macy’s doors partially covered graffiti that once read: “Black power.”