RIOT LOG: THURS MORN Uptown is still there

[dreamshark]

Last night there were horrific riots around the 3rd Precinct police station sparked by the police murder of black man George Floyd ("Say his name!"). Righteous protest degenerated into looting and burning, and today the area around Minnehaha and Lake looks like a war zone. During the night the mayhem spread up Lake Stree all the way to Uptown (as well as to a few disconnected locations.) I biked over there this morning to check it out.

There was no reason to protest there; it was straight up looting. Consequently the area is quiet and largely deserted today except for work crews replacing broken glass.  

Here's the CVS at Lake and Dupont where I get my prescriptions filled. Broken windows, but at least not burned down.

This is typical of the damage. Not burned to the ground, just a few windows broken so looters could get to the stuff inside. There is no ideological pattern to the damage, just the desire for cell phones, liquor, drugs, and miscellaneous stuff.




At least they spared Floyd's Barber Shop. I guess that would have been just too ironic.

But why Stella's?  I suspect they just wanted to access the rooftop dining area for the view, which must have been spectacular under the circumstances. It is the highest outdoor patio in Uptown.

Comments

[lydy]

As near as I can tell, there were multiple things going on last night. There were numerous peaceful protests. There were protests with a bit of reasonable and targeted vandalism against police assets. There was aggressive and unnecessary escalation by the police which resulted in the crowd turning feral, which I am pretty sure was intended, since it helps change the narrative away from "cops murdered an innocent person" and on towards "poor people are animals that must be contained." While all of this was going on, it looks like Uptown was subject to opportunistic smash-and-grab burglary, which is related to the protests only in that the perpetrators were taking advantage of the police being pre-occupied. There's going to be an attempt to lump all these things together, but I think we should try to understand the separate strands.

[arkuat]

I think you're absolutely right that the vandalism and theft outside of the immediate area of the 3rd precinct station was opportunistic, taking advantage of the cops abandoning their jobs.

In the immediate area of the 3rd precinct though, people recorded what definitely looked like an agent provocateurs smashing windows on the AutoZone (which later became the first business to burn). Whether the AP was a cop, a rogue boogaloo, or something else, I don't know, but it didn't take much to set off an angry crowd that had been getting maced, tear-gassed, and shot at with "less-than-lethal" rounds all day long. Without any orders to violate first, and without any warning.