The New York Times has admitted that the Black Lives Matter looting in cities such as Minneapolis, along with soft-on-crime policies, is responsible for the widespread organized robberies that businesses are seeing across the country.
Reporters Michael Corkery and Sapna Maheshwari wrote for The New York Times that some of the recent high-profile robberies “recall the looting that occurred across the country amid protests after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020,” which they noted caused “millions of dollars in damage.”
“Looting in general started during civil unrest, and it has now evolved,” said Ben Dugan, president of the Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail. “Criminal organizations saw during civil unrest that they were able to get their hands on millions of dollars of stolen product very quickly.”
The piece is careful to defend the lowering of penalties for theft over the past 16 years, but Corkery and Maheshwari do note that “some industry experts say the problem is not necessarily the laws but the lack of enforcement by the police and prosecutors, which emboldens enterprising thieves.”
This has become clear to everyone, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the most prominent Democratic governor in the country. But New York Times reporters acknowledging it while tying the smash-and-grab robberies to the looting we saw from the Black Lives Matter riots last year is a welcome development.
The riots from last year were not just despicable by nature of being riots. Homicides spiked in the aftermath of them, and now it’s evident that the looting we saw then emboldened the looters in the thefts we’re seeing now. That, combined with Democratic city leaders condemning their own police officers, which led to a surge in departures, and cutting police budgets helped pave the way for the organized raids on stores we are seeing now.
And, of course, those raids and the more sophisticated organized retail theft operations we are seeing are further emboldened by liberal district attorneys refusing to prosecute repeat offenders thanks to their obsession with ending “mass incarceration” by any means necessary. It’s a perfect storm of lawlessness overseen by Democratic city leaders who have become entranced with pursuing social justice over real justice.
Perhaps we are heading in the right direction, as Newsom urges California Democrats to clamp down on crime and The New York Times acknowledges the influence of Black Lives Matter riots on the current surge in high-profile smash-and-grab robberies. But it shouldn’t have taken this long for the realization that riots are bad and that career criminals should be prosecuted. The country would have been better off if legacy media and Democratic politicians could have seen the obvious sooner.
