Applied Economics - The Institutional Framework
Who the Looting Ruins
‘Seventeen years of work is gone,’ said the owner of an
Ecuadorean eatery.
By
The Editorial Board
June 4, 2020 7:37 pm ET
Luis Tamay is an immigrant with an Ecuadorean restaurant in
Minneapolis. Zola Dias is the black owner of a clothing store in
Atlanta. Sam Mabrouk has a denim shop in Columbus, Ohio. They’re
only a few of the people whom intellectuals overlook whenever they
rationalize rioting or say that property destruction isn’t
violence.
“Seventeen years of work is gone,” Mr. Tamay told the
Minneapolis Star Tribune after his restaurant, El Sabor Chuchi,
burned to the ground. When the rioting began, he stood watch. But
last Friday he obeyed curfew, believing that the National Guard
would control the streets. Then on Facebook he saw video of his
restaurant on fire. He told the newspaper he didn’t have insurance
because it was too expensive.
Safia Munye, a Somali immigrant in Minneapolis, opened Mama
Safia’s Kitchen in 2018 with money saved for retirement. When the
pandemic arrived, NPRreported, she couldn’t afford both insurance
and to pay her workers. She did the latter. Now the restaurant is
wrecked, but she’s hardly the intended target of George Floyd
protesters. “My heart is broken. My mind is broken,” she said. “I
know I can’t come back from this. But this can be replaced.
George’s life cannot. George’s life was more important.”
In Atlanta, Zola Dias lost more than $100,000 in goods from
his clothing store, Attom. “I’m very emotional when I talk about it
because I put my soul and life in this business,” he told the
Atlanta Business Chronicle. “I just want to tell people to go and
vote. That’s the only way to stop it and make a change.”
In San Francisco, Grace Jewelers was ransacked. “I can’t put a
dollar estimate on it now,” Paul Zhou, the owner’s husband, told
the Chronicle. “My wife is devastated.” In Dallas, Rodolfo
Bianchi’s empanada shop was trashed. “It was emotionally
heartbreaking to see all of your sweat, blood and tears just
shattered,” he said. “It wasn’t anger, I was just broken.”
King’s Fashion in Philadelphia is a burned-out mess. “I don’t
know what to do right now,” Helen Woo, a co-owner, told the
Journal. “I built it up,” said her husband, Sung. “And it’s gone.
My life is gone.” Masum Siddiquee lost about $200,000 of
merchandise from his Philly store, MN Fashion and Jewelry. “I have
no money right now,” he said.
“I lost everything in one night,” said Sam Mabrouk, counting
an estimated $70,000 in product stolen from his clothing shop in
Columbus, Ohio. “That was my savings from 11 years of working.
That’s what hurts more than anything.” In Milwaukee, Katherine
Mahmoud’s cellphone store was looted empty, which she said had
nothing to do with what the Floyd protesters are fighting for. “I
look just like them,” she told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
“Why?”
Some of these businesses are raising funds to help put the
pieces back together. Some might have insurance to cover at least a
portion of the losses. But others might not survive, and many
companies will go bust quietly, without making the newspapers.
Contrast this heartache with the cavalier attitude shown by at
least some intellectuals, who seem to think that firebombing a
local South American restaurant is merely the persuasive language
of the unheard.
OPINION
COMMENTARY
Don’t Call Rioters ‘Protesters’
As in the 1960s, rioters aren’t looking to make a political
point. They’re in it for the ‘fun and profit.’
By Barry Latzer
June 4, 2020 1:55 pm ET
Though thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets of
cities across the nation to express their outrage over the death of
George Floyd, many hundreds have engaged in mob violence and
looting. Mr. Floyd’s tragic death is, for them, a pretext for
hooliganism.
We’ve seen this before, back in the bad old days of the late
1960s, when rioting became a near-everyday occurrence. Economists
William J. Collins and Robert A. Margotallied an extraordinary 752
riots between 1964 and 1971. These disturbances involved 15,835
incidents of arson and caused 228 deaths, 12,741 injuries and
69,099 arrests. By an objective measure of severity, 130 of the 752
riots were considered “major,” 37 were labeled “massive” in their
destructiveness.
At the time, black radicals and some white leftists saw the
riots purely as political protest. Tom Hayden, the well-known New
Left leader, described the violence as “a new stage in the
development of Negro protest against racism, and as a logical
outgrowth of the failure of the whole society to support racial
equality.”
This analysis ignored the observations of witnesses on the
scene. Thousands of rioters in the 1960s and early 1970s engaged in
a joyful hooliganism—looting and destroying of property with wild
abandon—that had no apparent political meaning. In the Detroit riot
of July 1967, one of the era’s most lethal (43 people died in four
nightmarish days of turmoil), the early stage of the riot was
described by historian Sidney Fine as “a carnival atmosphere,” in
which, as reported by a black minister eyewitness, participants
exhibited “a gleefulness in throwing stuff and getting stuff out of
the buildings.” A young black rioter told a newspaper reporter that
he “really enjoyed” himself.
Analysts of urban rioting have identified a “Roman holiday”
stage in which youths, in “a state of angry intoxication, taunt the
police, burn stores with Molotov cocktails, and set the stage for
looting.” This behavior is less political protest than, in Edward
Banfield’s epigram of the day, “rioting mainly for fun and profit.”
We are seeing some of the same looting and burning today, often
treated by the media as mere exuberant protest.
Analyses of the riots that pinned blame on white bias and
black victimization buttressed the protest theory. Such
explanations received official sanction in the report of the
influential National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders
established by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967, and headed by
Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner. The Kerner Report famously declared that
“white racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture
which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World
War II.” While not explicitly calling the riots a justified revolt
by the victims of white racism, the Kerner Report certainly gave
that impression.
Today we have the Black Lives Matter movement, which claims
that police racism is the heart of the problem and calls for
“defunding” police departments. Its apologists ignore the pressing
need to protect black lives in communities where armed violent
criminals daily threaten law-abiding residents.
A seeming oddity of the disturbances of the late ’60s and
early ’70s is that they failed to materialize in many cities. An
analysis of 673 municipalities with populations over 25,000 found
that 75% of them experienced no riots. Even within riot-torn cities
it is estimated that 85% or more of the black population took no
part in them. Although they’ve gotten little or no media coverage I
expect we will see comparable enclaves of tranquility today.
One possible explanation for why some cities explode with
violence and others don’t is contagion theory: the tendency of
people to do what their friends are doing. Once the rocks and
bottles start flying in a neighborhood, it becomes tempting to join
in. Youths, who played a major role in the turbulence, are
particularly susceptible to peer influence. Consequently, when
teenagers and young men begin rampaging, the situation often
quickly escalates. No one wants to miss the party. As more young
people join in, what begins as a manageable event can rapidly
spiral out of control.
Closely related to the contagion theory is the threshold—or,
more popularly, the “tipping point”—hypothesis. Once a certain
number of rioters have become engaged, this view holds, those who
had preferred to stay on the sidelines will be motivated to jump
in. While imitation plays its part here too, the size of the event
in itself becomes the crucial determinant of the ultimate magnitude
of the riot.
Of course, a peaceful situation can quickly descend into
mayhem in the presence of provocateurs. Back in the ’60s, a new
generation of young black militants, such as Stokely Carmichael and
H. Rap Brown, traveled around the country making incendiary
speeches, unabashedly endorsing black revolution. Today we have
antifa and various anarchist groups using social media and
encrypted messages to organize the violence effectively but
anonymously.
Certainly, there are those who honestly believe that America’s
police are racist and in need of fundamental reforms. They are
mistaken, but they should have ample opportunity to express their
views peacefully. There should be no confusing such protesters,
however, with looters, arsonists and those who would kill police
officers. They deserve a different name: criminals.
Mr. Latzer is a professor emeritus at New York’s John Jay
College of Criminal Justice and author of “The Rise and Fall of
Violent Crime in America.”
Discuss the opportunity costs