The next night, the\u00a0looting grew and spread to the Bronx. \u201cComplete chaos. We had no idea what was happening,\u201d said Jessalyn Shen, whose family\u2019s pawn shop on East Fordham Road was robbed. \u201cFires were everywhere, people were looting.\u201d The Shens tried and failed to secure their store. Their calls to 911 went unanswered. The family dodged bricks to escape to their car and drive to safety, Shen recounted, their attackers chasing close behind in their vehicles.<\/p>\n
The lack of a police response to the nighttime\u00a0looting stood in stark contrast to the New York Police Department\u2019s deployment of its riot squad, the Strategic Response Group, or SRG, to suppress political protests during the day.<\/p>\n
When a peaceful march reached Manhattan\u2019s Bryant Park earlier that night, the police were ready: The SRG formed a line to block their advance. When the protesters knelt in the street, SRG officers struck with batons and made arrests. It was one example of many where the NYPD moved swiftly against demonstrators. The previous day, police mounted a “level three mobilization” against a protest in Brooklyn and responded in well under two hours, according to city records. NYPD data reported that at least 108 people were injured by police during last summer\u2019s unrest. The NYPD was roundly criticized by elected officials and in three government reports for using violent riot tactics against political protesters.<\/p>\n
It was a double-dip failure in public safety: Not only did the city brutalize protesters exercising their First Amendment right to assemble, but it also stood by as throngs of nonpolitical actors rampaged the city’s storefronts. Risks to residents and property damage in and around protests paled in comparison to the widespread looting in New York, yet the police responses to nonideological rioting were markedly slower.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a tremendous management failure here,\u201d said Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College, referring to the NYPD. \u201cThat raises this question about their ability to handle multiple problems at once, their ability to adequately assess what’s a real threat to public order \u2014 and the possibility of political bias in the sense of misapprehending the threat posed by protests.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, The Intercept is publishing emails from NYC Emergency Management<\/a>, or NYCEM, which represent the real-time intelligence the mayor\u2019s office and first response agencies had during the entire 11-day period of last summer\u2019s civil unrest. Emergency Management, formerly called the Office of Emergency Management or OEM, coordinates interagency response to city crises. The reports provide detailed documentation of the size, location, and tenor of the protests.<\/p>\n\n The emails also provide rare documentation of the two nights of\u00a0rioting\u00a0that gripped Manhattan and the Bronx \u2014 revealing what the city knew and when. The reports reveal that not only was the city conscious of the\u00a0looting\u00a0shortly after it began just after midnight the night of May 31, but also that the police department did not mount an organized response for four hours. The documents also reveal for the first time the boundaries of the riots, as defined by the city, which was approximately 90 city blocks on the first night. Despite Mayor Bill de Blasio\u2019s efforts to link the looting to the protests, there were no known political demonstrations in the vicinity of the mass looting.<\/p>\n The emails show a lack of attention to the Bronx, the city\u2019s poorest borough. Emergency Management did not pick up on the looting in the Bronx on the night of June 1 for several hours \u2014 even as the agency was closely monitoring simultaneous events in Manhattan. Neither the mayor’s office nor the NYPD responded to requests for comment for this article.<\/p>\n \u201cThe NYPD is by far the country’s largest police department. They were heavily mobilized on these days, and yet they seem incapable of a distributed response to multiple kinds of problems,\u201d said Vitale. \u201cThey put all of their energy into the suppression of these protests and didn’t deal with the looting. So, this raises the question: Was it a management failure? Was it that they’re so focused on the threat of protest that they didn’t leave any capacity to do anything else?\u201d<\/p>\n Vitale added, \u201cOne conclusion we can draw from this is that the police narrative that they are essential for producing order doesn’t seem to be consistent with their inability to properly manage demonstrations and protect property from looting.\u201d<\/p>\n Less than an hour after midnight on May 31, Emergency Management issued its first report on looting \u201cin the vicinity of: Bowling Green, Houston Street, 14 Street, Broadway and Broome Street.\u201d It was 12:42 a.m., and the mayor\u2019s office was aware of the\u00a0riots in Manhattan.<\/p>\n \u201cLarge disorderly crowds continue disturbances and looting at numerous locations,\u201d NYCEM reported at 2:10 a.m. \u201cExtensive property damage reported throughout the borough where looting has occurred.\u201d<\/p>\n The NYPD\u2019s response was scattered and ineffective. At 3 a.m., NYCEM reported that the department had requested additional resources. According to the report, there were \u201cmultiple store fronts being looted and extensive property damage\u201d by large crowds at East Houston Street and Bowery, as well as at the Chanel store on Spring Street, where a person was injured then transported to a hospital. Around 4 a.m., NYCEM reported \u201cnumerous storefronts being looted\u201d at Spring Street and Broadway and that a police officer was struck by a fleeing vehicle at East Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue.<\/p>\n It was around that same time that police began establishing a perimeter around SoHo \u2014 their first effort to mount an organized response, more than three hours after NYCEM had first reported the looting. The perimeter blocked vehicles and pedestrians from entering the area between Canal Street and Houston Street, bounded by Bowery and Seventh Avenue (Varick Street): an area over 90 city blocks in size that did not even cover all of the locations that NYCEM had reported\u00a0where looting occurred. NYCEM reported that the\u00a0riots abated by 5 a.m.<\/p>\n The following day,\u00a0rioting\u00a0started earlier in the night, spread more widely \u2014 through Manhattan and across the Harlem River into the Bronx \u2014 and saw a dramatic increase in looting, despite a citywide curfew imposed by de Blasio. The NYCEM reports document the looting extensively but do not indicate a police response congruent to the magnitude of the widespread criminal activity. The NYCEM reports did not prescribe the\u00a0riot zone\u2019s boundaries that night.<\/p>\n By 10:05 p.m., \u201cLarge crowds looting storefronts\u201d at Astor Place and Broadway; 14th Street and Sixth Avenue; and 49th Street and Broadway, according to NYCEM reports. By midnight, \u201cLooting in multiple stores,\u201d at 34th Street and Eighth Avenue; 41st Street and Seventh Avenue; 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue; 43rd Street and Madison Avenue; 51st Street and Eighth Avenue. By 1:45 a.m., multiple stores were being looted in SoHo, as well as at West 33 Street and Broadway. At 2:30 a.m., an NYCEM report noted, \u201cLooting continues in the Midtown Manhattan vicinity at multiple locations\u201d and in SoHo.<\/p>\n In the Bronx, Jessalyn Shen and another shop owner, who declined to be named, citing a police investigation, said looting began at stores at about 9 p.m. But it was not until 2:30 a.m. that reports of looting in the borough came through in NYCEM\u2019s reports. \u201cBurnside Avenue and Creston Avenue, Fordham Road: NYPD reports looting in multiple storefront locations by large crowds,\u201d one report around that time said. By 3:20 a.m., multiple storefronts were looted at Crotona Avenue and East Tremont Avenue, while an NYPD helicopter surveyed Bay Plaza Mall. The NYCEM report concluded at 4 a.m., with \u201cminor disturbances\u201d persisting in the Bronx.<\/p>\n From May 31 to June 3, the NYPD reported 432 burglaries in Manhattan and 186 in the Bronx, according to The Intercept\u2019s analysis of department crime data. By contrast, there were at least 276 property-related arrests during this same period, according to an analysis of NYPD arrest data by the city\u2019s Department of Investigation, a watchdog agency. (The department\u2019s tabulation did not distinguish between alleged property crimes committed in the course of protests versus looting.) The evening of June 1, there were 2,319 calls to 911 for commercial burglary \u2014 46 times the usual call volume \u2014 as well as 51 ATM thefts, the Department of Investigation reported. According to internal NYPD data obtained by The Intercept, there were at least 475 burglary arrests associated with the unrest for the entire 11-day period of protests.<\/p>\n It was the largest mass crime event since the 1977 blackouts, when a ConEdison power outage cast the city into darkness, resulting in widespread looting and arson: the only time the city experienced multiborough riots in modern times before last summer.<\/p>\n An NYPD Police Academy instructor\u2019s guide published by The Intercept last month<\/a> lays out how police view the origins of disorder: \u201cThe cause of civil disorder is usually a deep seeded, underlying, societal disparity, coupled with a lack of proper response by law enforcement and other government agencies.\u201d Last summer, the first condition was satisfied by the coronavirus, which exacerbated long-existing structural issues, like poverty and inequality, that have traditionally been linked to crime. The second condition was met by the city\u2019s hourslong delayed response to looting. The police guide warns, \u201cRapid mobilization is the key to quelling disorder. The sooner personnel are mobilized \u2026 the better the chance of avoiding a full-scale riot.\u201d<\/p>\n Brian Higgins, former chief of the Bergen County Police Department in New Jersey, explained the rationale underlying that training. \u201cWhen a crowd starts getting to that point where they become a riot, time is of the essence. You have to act and act swiftly and you have to be very decisive,\u201d said Higgins, an adjunct professor at John Jay College who teaches emergency incident management. \u201cOnce the crowd becomes overly violent, or extremely violent, that’s very hard to regain that ability to manage the crowd again.\u201d<\/p>\n Compounding the city\u2019s mistakes was the police department\u2019s failure to accurately model how civil unrest unfolds. According to SRG training documents published by The Intercept in April<\/a>, the NYPD\u2019s riot squad was taught to recognize three narrow categories of protesters: the \u201ceveryday citizen,\u201d\u00a0those who apply for permits and “honor the first amendment”; the \u201cprofessional\u201d protester, who breaks minor laws and \u201cmay be paid to be arrested through donors\u201d; and the \u201canarchist,\u201d who may \u201cchallenge authority\u201d and \u201cdestroy property.\u201d<\/p>\n SRG training documents show three narrow categories of protesters:the \u201ceveryday citizen,\u201d\u00a0those who\u00a0apply for permits and \u201chonor the first amendment\u201d; the \u201cprofessional\u201d protester, who breaks minor laws and \u201cmay be paid to be arrested through donors\u201d; and the \u201canarchist,\u201d who may \u201cchallenge authority\u201d and \u201cdestroy property.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Remarkably, the SRG Guide and police training modules did not include any counter-looting tactics whatsoever, despite such measures being included in the guidelines<\/a> of the Disorder Control Unit, the predecessor to the SRG. The Disorder Control Unit was created after the city\u2019s failure to contain the 1991 Crown Heights riots; in 2015, early in de Blasio\u2019s tenure, the unit\u2019s responsibilities were folded into the work of the newly created SRG.<\/p>\n An illustration demonstrating counter-looting tactics is seen in the Disorder Control Unit guidelines.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In addition to its failure to train on looting, the NYPD\u2019s response was also hindered by misfocused intelligence and a breakdown in the chain of command, according to a letter to the state attorney general from the Sergeants Benevolent Association, the union representing NYPD sergeants.<\/p>\n \u201cDid the Department possess intelligence relative to outside agitators, organized looting rings and\/or criminal enterprises which planned to damage property and burglarize commercial establishments during the civil unrest?\u201d asked the letter<\/a>, signed by SBA President Ed Mullins. \u201cIf so, how was that information acted upon, if at all?\u201d The letter also cites mayoral interference with NYPD command strategies and asks whether particular, previously established procedures were put in place during the specific emergency at hand.<\/p>\n The NYPD has updated its police training since last summer to encompass more categories of protesters. According to a report produced by the city\u2019s Department of Investigation, the NYPD now recognizes \u201cthe non-ideological opportunist\u201d as a fourth type of actor \u2014 a label that more accurately describes the looters. Prior to this development, the SRG did not make a distinction between politically motivated protesters and profit-driven opportunists. The result was a swift violent crackdown, not on the\u00a0looters who posed a serious public safety threat, but on the people protesting against police brutality.<\/p>\n An NYPD officer stands in a looted souvenir and electronics shop near Times Square on June 2, 2020, in New York City.<\/p>\n \nPhoto: John Moore\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n As the Shens were beaten in front of their store in the Bronx, the police were less than a block away. As she tried to escape, family matriarch Wendy Shen, an immigrant from Taiwan, was dragged from her car by people armed with crowbars, baseball bats, and a sledgehammer. The family called 911 repeatedly \u2014 as did the neighboring bodega, which was also looted \u2014 but no help came.<\/p>\n The attackers, undeterred by the cops, left Wendy Shen with a shattered femur. She would be hospitalized for two weeks, undergo three surgeries, and endure months of rehabilitation. The family lost a few million dollars from the stolen gold and jewelry, the damage to their store, and their totaled car. Their insurance company refused to cover the losses, Jessalyn Shen said, and the family shuttered the store in February.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was most frustrating to be a block away from Fordham Road and see the police cars and to, like, scream for help, and have nobody come, even though they can see you, and hear you, and they just didn’t move,\u201d Jessalyn Shen said. \u201cThe police didn\u2019t walk the one block over to help us, even though they could see what was going on.\u201d<\/p>\n Jessalyn Shen said that detectives investigating the robbery the next day told the family that officers were instructed not to leave their posts that night. While NYPD officers generally have broad discretion to act, during times of civil unrest, they are instructed to suspend their discretion and strictly follow orders, according to the NYPD Academy\u2019s training documents.<\/p>\n \u201cThere might be looting two blocks away, the cops can’t respond because they were told, \u2018Don’t leave this post,\u2019\u201d said Higgins, the former police chief. Ideally, he said, commanders should allow for certain circumstances that would permit officers to leave their post.<\/p>\n Higgins added that situations like what happened in the Bronx are a balancing act. \u201cYou need to have those on the ground have the ability to make decisions,\u201d he said. \u201cOn the other hand, people on the ground don’t always see what those in the emergency operation center or command post can see.\u201d<\/p>\n The NYPD\u2019s tactics resembled what is known as the \u201cfixed post\u201d approach, which was previously faulted for exacerbating the Crown Heights riots. The state government\u2019s 1993 report<\/a> on Crown Heights stated \u201cbecause the police were deployed at fixed posts, roving bands were able to move through the neighborhood. These roving bands committed violent acts and moved elsewhere before the police could respond.\u201d The police commissioner at the time, Lee Brown, acknowledged that the fixed post tactics made the Crown Heights riots worse.<\/p>\n\u201cThey put all of their energy into the suppression of these protests and didn’t deal with the looting.\u201d<\/blockquote>\n
The\u00a0Riots<\/h3>\n
Strategic Failure<\/h3>\n
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\nThrowback Tactics<\/h3>\n
\u201cThe police didn\u2019t walk the one block over to help us, even though they could see what was going on.\u201d<\/blockquote>\n