City Safari: Philadelphia Sees Little Lockdown During Its Pandemic Of Violence, Looting And Destruction
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Philadelphia sees little lockdown during its pandemic of violence, looting and destruction
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Wed, Jun 03, 2020
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By Thom Nickels
Contributing Editor
A video of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis was posted on Facebook before the ensuing protests and riots in Philadelphia and many other cities. Like many people, I watched the video barely believing what I was seeing: A man begging for his life, asking to be allowed to breathe as a police officer (he hardly deserves the title) wedged his leg against the man’s neck as three fellow officers, accomplices essentially, observed the goings on with relative indifference. At a certain point one officer walked away from the scene, his body language (hands on his hips) indicating someone who was very nervous about what was taking place. I didn’t finish watching the film. Like those shocking videos of Islamist jihad beheadings in the desert, sometimes you have to turn them off.
The street protests in the beginning were decent demonstrations although anyone familiar with protest culture today realizes that there’s always an undercurrent of violence ready to emerge.
As the protests grew one could feel the emerging shadow of Antifa and other demonic forces gaining strength. I asked myself: How long would it be before the usual suspects infiltrated the demonstrations and put their own stamp on it?
The peaceful protests did turn violent. Part of the reason they turned violent can be attributed to the unnecessary national lockdown over covid-19. The lockdown contributed to feelings of massive feelings of frustration. It laid the groundwork. For three months all CNN and the corporate media could talk about was the virus and how everyone was on the verge of death.
It saturated our consciousness; defined our life, limited our movements. Then we witnessed—and are still witnessing--the quarantine of the healthy rather than a quarantine of the sick. Overnight it seemed we had all become prisoners and lost our freedoms.
The repression of our freedoms in the name of health set the ‘social’ water on a high boil. The rapid pace of the peaceful-to-rioting protests reminded me of how an obscure virus in China so swiftly turned into a global pandemic. The two scenarios seem linked in a strange way…in a way that I cannot grasp.
The ugly facts of Floyd’s murder captured the attention (and heart) of everyone. Even staunch defenders of the police seemed to take pause and rethink everything they thought they knew about racial injustice. Before the violence it was a perfect moment for social change.
Like a viral fever the violence spread everywhere and did its damage. As the names of cities began to pile up—Los Angeles, New York, Denver, Detroit, Philadelphia—and the list of damages and destroyed properties grew, the more Floyd’s name seemed to recede into the background. The violence-- even as Floyd’s own brother was calling for the rioters to stay calm--was taking over and replacing Floyd’s murder and memory with another atrocity.
The riots, in effect, tarnished and dishonored Floyd. And they are still doing that.
I walked through Center City and surveyed the damage caused by the riots and looting. Many Center City residents had the same idea and were taking photographs of their beloved city in tatters. Expletives spray painted on the fronts and sides of old buildings like the Belgravia on Walnut Street, WFSF bank were common. ATMs were hammered in; Wells Fargo Bank was plastered with boards. The CVS near Rittenhouse Square had just enough glass punched out of its front window so that looters could crawl inside and topple over merchandise in the aisles.
I started my walk up Chestnut Street but couldn’t turn on Walnut because police had the area blocked off. The high-rise fire from the night before was still causing complications.
Onlookers strained their necks to see the burned-out tops of buildings, many taking photos. I detoured down Locust passing Rouge which was serving food and drinks outdoors, a line of takers waiting in line to order. Walking along Locust the scene was more normal but that changed when I was able to finally make a turn on Walnut.
I passed a clothing store with a tiny side window broken through revealing an accessible rack of expensive sneakers. Whoever broke the window wanting to snatch the sneakers had apparently been apprehended in the knick of time.
Some stores were left untouched. Barnes and Noble, for instance, didn’t have a scratch on it—looters do not like to read—and Brooks Brothers’ front door had just one small spider webbed scar, not quite broken glass. The looters must have changed their minds when they spotted all those bow ties. The expensive athletic and sneaker store next to Brooks Brothers, North Point, was a different story: it was boarded up.
I watched as armies of bike cops rode in tandem up and down the streets, but there were no looters for them to take note of. Center City volunteers carried buckets and brooms and began the work of scrubbing away the spray-painted expletives and hollow political slogans. It was a positive sight.
I headed down East Market Street via Saint John the Evangelist Church on 13th Street, but since churches do not sell sneakers, the church and its statues were left unharmed, though that was not the case in Washington DC where the Church of the Presidents, Saint John’s, was set on fire (and the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King spoke, vandalized).
Macy’s, which had been attacked hours before, showed no signs of a break-in (the store has been boarded up since the virus lockdown). Along Market Street, one of Century 21’s windows had been smashed as well as the front windows of other stores.
For three days the looters ran willy-nilly throughout the city. Police seemed to be operating with their hands tied, arresting only a few people. At the height of the drama, rather than use tear gas or rubber bullets, it seemed that the police had instituted a hands off policy. Online videos showed looters demolishing police cars and setting them on fire as officers ran away like scared rabbits. In one video, 6 or 7 police cars were destroyed as police stood by like hand wringing church ladies. Do videos lie? The police seemed to be holding themselves back. As I played and replayed the video, I noticed a pattern.
Every city that had been hit with looter violence is one that has a Democratic mayor. As a registered Democrat, I say this with some sadness. Progressive Democratic politics is unusually politically correct. In almost every instance, all of the Democratic mayors did as Mayor Kenney did: they adopted a watch and wait attitude, using no tear gas or effective crowd control measures (prior to the writing of this story,) for fear of alienating the mob and possibly killing someone. This would put the name of their city on the top of CCN news, a "municipal executor” no better than the officer who killed George Floyd.
All the Democratic mayors seemed to be holding back because they feared being labeled racists if they employed harsh tactics to deal with the looters.
After my walk through Center City, I headed home to my neighborhood in Fishtown and Port Richmond to discover that my own area had been attacked. A string of stores along Aramingo Avenue had been vandalized, as were several stores in my local shopping center. My local WAWA, a stone’s throw away from my house, had all of its windows shattered. The IGA supermarket had also been hit, as well as another athletic sports wear and sneaker store near the IGA.
The terrorists then moved up and down Aramingo Ave. and farther into Kensington.
Before press time, the looters attacked Jefferson Hospital’s Neuro Clinic in Center City.
During all of this, our weak mayor seemed to vascilate, afraid to protect the citizens of Philadelphia and their property from destruction by coming down hard on the looters. He seemed to be sitting back with his head in the sand, afraid to act for fear of offending the rioters.
The price of waiting to act can be disastrous. The businesses along Chestnut and Walnut Street, already hurting because of the lockdown, now have to deal with the aftermath of terrorism. There’s no guarantee that these businesses are going to want to stay in Philadelphia when (and if) the smoke clears. If riots and looting are the future of big cities in America, then it would behoove these businesses to move to safer, smaller environments.
On June 1, when I thought that the looting and mayhem was over, there was more trouble along the Ben Franklin Bridge and in my own neighborhood.
The looters and terrorists, in the end, have accomplished nothing. They have murdered George Floyd a second time.
They have also all but guaranteed the reelection of Donald Trump this November.
