CHICAGO – Broken glass and other debris from looted shops were cleared on Tuesday after a wave of violence swept through the city’s top shopping districts.
For some experts, the unrest – in which more than 100 people were arrested and 13 policemen were injured – represents long-lasting frustrations that eventually boil over. Others say the violence was opportunistic in nature, and crime spilled into the streets.
The riot happened early Monday, hours after a police officer in the South Side neighborhood of Englewood. Officers responded to a call about a person with a gun, the police department said. Officials said they were trying to confront a man who matched a description of the suspect when he escaped, and shot at police.
The officers shot back, hitting the man, who is said to be 20 years old. He has been taken to a hospital and is expected to survive, according to Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown.
“This was not an organized protest. It was an incident of pure crime,” Brown said Monday. “Criminals took to the streets with the confidence that there would be no consequences for their actions. I refuse these cowardly actions to hold our city hostage.”
Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who took office last year, said the wave of property damage and looting was “criminal”.
“We will wake up in the morning in shock,” Lightfoot said, adding that the melody “had nothing to do with protected expression of First Amendment.”
David Stovall, a professor of black studies and criminology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the uprising sent a clear message.
“This put everyone on notice that people had enough,” he said. “They say this is what it means to be poor, hungry and full, and if we are really not ready to tackle the fundamental issue of housing, health care and employment, then we will do it.”
The brazenness of people who openly plunder and attack police officers shows that they feel they have nothing to lose, he added. “You’re so dumb, so unwise and so unfranchised, so what could be any less than that?”
“This came without a doubt a long time ago.”
Jennifer Cobbina, a professor of law at Michigan State University, also sees a link between looting and long-standing marginalization.
“One perspective that has shown much of the research on civil unrest, which means looting and insurrection, is that when they occur, they are expressions of heightened anger and they are symptomatic of systemic social problems,” she said. ‘If there is a deep complaint that has not been adequately addressed, along with people who feel ignored, then that is when uprisings occur. For people who are marginalized and ignored, uprisings serve as a mechanism to listen to their grievances and suppress a system that suppresses them. ‘
Brown said “tempers flare, fueled by misinformation” about the shooting, including false reports that the victim was a teenager.
The officers involved in the shooting will be placed on administrative duties, per departmental protocol, and the shooting will be investigated, police said.
Despite the misinformation, the uprising is still a commentary on what it means to exist in a state of policing, Stovall added. “These people are frustrated to the point that everything proposed by the police is unbelievable because of the history that the police department has in those particular weeks.”
The chaos occurred amid an overhaul in gun violence in Chicago this year that has hit communities of color particularly hard. The city has experienced more than 2,200 shootings this year, almost all concentrated on the west and south sides, according to data released by The Chicago Tribune.
But other experts claim that there was no political intent and that looting was an opportunistic ploy to commit crimes in the shadow of a real movement.
“This was a coordinated movement by people who knew they could move in large numbers with impunity,” said Wesley Skogan, professor emeritus at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.
“Protests do not come in the middle of the night. “They happen on the day there are cameras to capture them,” he said. That clearly did not happen here. “
While perennial frustration with law enforcement has often caused violence within local communities, it rarely moves that violence outside its neighborhood, experts say.
“This kind of caravan by people to outlying locations is very different,” Skogan said, adding that social media largely helped mobilize the attack in downtown.
“It’s an interesting shift we’ve not seen in Chicago in a while, where people said we’re not going to hurt our communities, we’re going somewhere else,” Stovall said.
The city’s city councils have long criticized the disproportionate funding and benefit to Chicago’s charitable areas – many of which were plundered – over its war-torn neighborhoods.
“In recent months, too many people – disproportionately black and brown – have lost their jobs, lost their income, lost their homes and lost their lives because the city has done nothing and the Chicago elite has benefited,” Black Lives Matter Chicago said in a statement. “When Protestants attack high-rise shops owned by the rich and serving the rich, that is not ‘our’ city and it is never meant for us.”
It was the second time the affluent shopping district has been hit since May with looting in the wake of nationwide protests against the George Floyd police murder in Minneapolis.
But some also worry that the incident will trigger an aggressive blowback by law enforcement that will foster an impressive cycle of violence and mistrust between police and color communities.
Lightfoot has already taken a hard line stance that the looting was “criminal activity” and “direct criminal activity.”
Stovall thinks it is important to address the factors that fuel dissatisfaction.
“We need to get away from the idea that it’s just a lot of bad people coming together to do bad things and really understand what it means to live in those circumstances forever,” Stovall said. “If you live under those circumstances in eternity, the response will not be peaceful or orderly, which is a difficult matter to deal with, but we are in a moment where we cannot ignore it.”
