CHICAGO: Hundreds of looters and vandals descended on downtown Chicago early Monday following a police shooting on the city’s South Side, smashing the windows of dozens of businesses and making off with merchandise, cash machines and anything else they could carry, police said.

Hours earlier, police shot a man after he opened fire on officers Sunday afternoon an incident that apparently prompted a social media post urging looters to converge on the business district, Police Superintendent David Brown told a news conference.

Some 400 additional officers were dispatched to the area after the department spotted the post. Over several hours, police made more than 100 arrests and 13 officers were injured, including one who was struck in the head with a bottle, Brown said.

Brown dismissed any suggestion that the chaos was part of an organized protest of the shooting, instead calling it "pure criminality" that included occupants of a vehicle opening fire on police who were arresting a man they spotted carrying a cash register.

No officers were wounded by gunfire, but a security guard and a civilian were hospitalised in critical condition after being shot, and five guns were recovered, he said.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot agreed that the melee had nothing to do with a protest. This was straight-up felony criminal conduct, she said. This was an assault on our city.

The looting brightened the national spotlight that has been on Chicago for weeks after a surge in gun violence that resulted in more homicides in July than any month in decades. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly criticized the city’s handling of the violence, recently ordered more federal agents to Chicago to take part in what Attorney General William Barr called classic crime fighting.

Further ratcheting up the tensions in the city was a video that circulated on Facebook hours before the looting that falsely claimed that Chicago police had shot and killed a 15-year-old boy. Posted at 6:30pm, the video shows upset residents confronting officers near the scene where officers shot and wounded an adult suspect who they said had fired at them that day. By Monday morning, it had been watched nearly 100,000 times.

Witnesses to the looting described a scene that bore a striking resemblance to the unrest that unfolded when protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis devolved into chaos. Brown suggested that the lenient treatment of people arrested then played a role in what happened Monday.

Not many of those cases were prosecuted to the full extent, he said. These looters, these thieves, these criminals being emboldened by (the lack of) consequences ... emboldened to do more.

Published in Dawn, August 11th, 2020