A sizable crowd gathered in Philadelphia’s Center City neighborhood on Tuesday night, and stores were looted, according to police. More than a dozen people were arrested.
Looting started soon after peaceful protests over the judge’s decision to drop all charges against Mark Dial, a former Philadelphia police officer, for fatally shooting Eddie Irizarry, 27, on August 14 ended, according to authorities. The chief of police for the city stated that he thought the looters were “opportunists” who were unrelated to the protests.
“The protests have nothing to do with this. According to Commissioner John Stanford, what happened tonight was a group of criminal opportunists taking advantage of an occasion.
Around 8 o’clock at night, establishments began calling the police to complain that they had been broken into or ransacked, according to Stanford.
Around 7:30 p.m., the Irizarry case protest came to a conclusion. Although the police department had started removing policemen from the area, Stanford claimed that there were still enough there to rapidly respond to 911 calls concerning break-ins.
Officers responded to the stores, taking “15 to 20 people” into custody while attempting to disperse swarms of “juveniles and young adults,” according to Stanford.
The commissioner remarked, “We were told that the crowd got as big as maybe 100 or so who were just making their way through the Center City area.”
According to Stanford, reports of looting started in the Center City region and spread to adjacent districts.
The commissioner informed reporters that “we’re looking into the possibility that there was a caravan of a number of different vehicles that were moving from location to location.”
According to Stanford, it appears that the robbers came from various areas of the city. He added that police were still trying to determine the origin of the robbers and how the various vehicles might be related.
Stanford stated that it was unclear how many businesses were affected on Tuesday, but that pharmacies, high-end shops, wine and spirit stores, and clothes and sneaker shops were among the stores that were attacked.
A cell phone video that CNN was able to obtain on Tuesday night shows several individuals dashing into and ransacking an Apple shop while wearing hoodies. A different video showed police detaining a number of people in front of a Lululemon store, where apparel was lying around on the ground.
In another location, officers could be seen standing outside a Foot Locker store where a window had been broken and items were scattered all over the floor, according to a video from CNN affiliate KYW.
As Stanford briefed the public Tuesday night, police were still responding to 911 calls on the looting, but the commissioner said he believes cops “have it contained.”
According to Stanford, investigators will be reviewing local videos in order to make additional arrests.
“We made arrests and we will keep making arrests until we have all of the people, or a number of people, who have been accountable for what we’ve seen tonight in custody,” he said.
The reports of store thefts in Philadelphia come as a number of businesses, both big and small, claim they are having difficulty stopping store crimes that are hurting their profits.