The Chicago police arrested 43 people who participated in the looting spree along the city’s Mag Mile earlier this week. Who were these looters?
According to the Chicago Tribune, they were “an odd mix of peer-pressured college students, out-of-work parents, and convicted felons.” It would be interesting to know how much time the convicted felons had served, and for what crimes. Their looting could be another product of America’s under-incarceration problem.
Ostensibly, the looting was a response to a police shooting in the Englewood neighborhood. Yet, according to the Tribune, none of arrested looters was from Englewood.
In fact, no one who made a statement in court upon being arraigned even mentioned the incident. Not only was the police shooting a pretext for the looting, it was so far from the looters’ consciousness that they forgot to mention it.
The prevailing motive of this “odd mix” wasn’t “police brutality,” it was the desire to snatch free stuff and, at least some cases, to smash things. In other words, envy and resentment, not “social justice.”
The looting was an organized event. The Tribune reports:
Carloads of people descended on downtown and the North Side, smashing shop windows and carrying out TVs, Gucci and Louis Vuitton bags, iPhones, jewelry and other merchandise, sometimes piling them into waiting U-Hauls. . . .
Up and down the Mag Mile, men and women were suddenly appearing outside upscale businesses and, like clockwork, smashing their way inside, taking thousands of dollars of merchandise and vanishing. The looting quickly moved to the South Loop and the Near North Side.
Two brothers and another man, all with felony backgrounds, allegedly helped clean out an Apple store near Halsted Street and North Avenue in Lincoln Park. When police pulled over their blue Chevy Tahoe, they found $17,000 worth of iPhones inside. . . .
On Huron Street, video shows a man inside the Lester Lambert store methodically handing display cases of jewelry — as well as a gun found in a lockbox — to people waiting outside. As police arrived, he ran from the store and slammed into the commander of the Near North police district, knocking her to the ground.
He told arresting officers that he learned of the looting on Facebook.
Six men were caught with guns at looting scenes, including a convicted felon and registered gun offender who prosecutors said fled in a getaway car outside the Louis Vuitton store, leaving behind his loaded handgun with an extended magazine. He was ordered held on $300,000 bail.
Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, pressed State’s Attorney Kim Foxx (of Jussie Smollett fame) to make sure there will be “consequences” for the looting. It’s odd that a mayor perceives the need to press a prosecutor to come down on looters, but that’s the way it is in many of America’s big cities now. Left-wing mayors and prosecutors even further to the left.
Foxx is one of the growing number of prosecutors backed by George Soros. With public safety in cities like Chicago depending on the likes of her, we can expect a diet of riots, looting, and violent crime.
We can also expect an exodus from such cities. Unfortunately, Soros is also helping to install anti-police prosecutors in some of the nation’s suburbs.
