On the sidelines of pacifist demonstrations, looting pushed the mayor of New York to extend the curfew in the city that never sleeps.
The center of Manhattan was the scene of looting Monday night, prompting the mayor of New York to announce a longer curfew as of Tuesday.
Branded stores, such as Nike or Michael Kors on 5th Avenue, or electronics or Lego stores on other major streets of Midtown were looted in the early evening, before a cover came into effect. unprecedented fire from 23:00 local (03:00 GMT), noted AFP journalists.
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Groups of young people, often ten, circulated from one street to another, while entire streets of this district, which was normally very touristy but deserted with the pandemic, were blocked by the police.
Images from local NY1 television showed young people running out of a Best Buy electronics store before being apprehended by police. Stores in lower Manhattan suffered the same fate, according to an AFP photographer.
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Some on social media claimed that the famous Macy’s department store had also been targeted by the looters, but the police did not immediately confirm this information, simply indicating that “many businesses” had been targeted and people arrested “by the hundreds. “.
Mayor Bill de Blasio deemed the situation “unacceptable”. He announced that the curfew would begin as early as 8 p.m. Tuesday, instead of 11 p.m. Monday. “The city is totally under control, and for the most part calm and peaceful,” he nevertheless assured on the NY1 channel.
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The imposition of a curfew had been announced a few hours earlier by the mayor and governor Andrew Cuomo, after demonstrations and looting during the weekend, especially in the trendy district of SoHo.
The American economic capital followed in the footsteps of some forty other cities, which imposed curfews in the face of the riots that engulfed the country after the death of an unarmed man, George Floyd, on Monday in Minnesota, new symbol of police brutality against the black minority.
Just after 11 p.m., a hundred people gathered in front of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, the scene of major protests in recent days. They fell on their knees in tribute to the victims of these brutalities, according to an AFP journalist.
Police officers observed them from a distance, without questioning them despite this formal violation of the curfew.
While New York was confronted with these looting, President Donald Trump announced from Washington the deployment of “thousands of heavily armed soldiers” and police in Washington to put an end to “the riots” and “the looting”.
Mayor De Blasio, a Democrat, denounced “the bellicose terms” and “polarizing rhetoric” of the Republican president, who is seeking re-election in November.
“It was not his statements in the last few hours that caused all of this, it was what he did in recent years that contributed to it,” he said.
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