Carla Lara received a motion alert Friday inside her jewelry store in downtown Los Angeles, California. He thought it was a false alarm, but he saw through security cameras that there were intruders breaking windows and taking jewelry and cash. It was useless to call 911: then hundreds of police officers were trying to contain the protests in that city by George Floyd’s death.
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Losses from looting and destruction amount to $ 200,000, calculates this Mexican immigrant. “It will be difficult to recover because we were precisely closed for two months due to the virus. Could not work. We barely reopened on Tuesday. They took all the merchandise. I don’t know when we are going to reopen, “Lara lamented in an interview with Univision 34.
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His business is not the only one affected by the riots when they were already going through one of their worst crises.
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From liquor stores and family restaurants, to sports shoe stores and supermarket chains in several cities in the country, have been stolen and even burned down, tarnishing the protests demanding justice for George Floyd. These stores have only been open since the order to stay home for the pandemic at the middle of March. His future is now uncertain.
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Both the number of establishments affected and the amount of the losses are still being evaluated. The impact goes further considering that several workers will remain unemployed at the beginning of a virtual economic crisis. Some had been idle for several weeks for the virus.
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“They are hurting a lot of people, businesses and families. There were employees crying because they have to pay the rent (…) and they already lost their jobs again ”, said Lara, whose jewelry store opened 20 years ago.
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Entrepreneur Sean Wotherspoon also watched in frustration from surveillance cameras as they took pairs of tennis shoes and high-end clothing from inside his store on Melrose Avenue in west Los Angeles. They took around $ 250,000 worth of merchandise. On Sunday, he recounted the damage with a video he published in Instagram He didn’t say a single word when recording it.
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Whotherspoon placed boards at the entrance to his business to protect him, but he did not stop the thieves. They smashed the wood, the front door, and the windows. They just left some display tennis shoes and boxes. “George Floyd RIP 2020,” they wrote spray on the front of their store.
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The businesses most affected in Los Angeles They are in the city center, the Fairfax District, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and Santa Monica. More than 400 people were arrested in that area on Sunday. To prevent further looting, a curfew was issued starting at 1 pm on Monday throughout Angelino County.
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“The focus should be on ending systemic racism and ending senseless violence against black men and women, and we cannot allow a small number of people to hijack that movement, putting lives at risk and destroying property,” said the Los Angeles Mayor Erik Garcetti in a statement.
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This metropolis has been the scene of violent revolts in the past. The one that occurred in 1992, for the acquittal of four white police officers who gave him beat up African-American Rodney King, it left property damage estimated at $ 1.4 billion. It was the most costly brawl in the United States and that time the National Guard also had to intervene to stop the damage.
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“That is not a protest, it is vandalism”
Other businesses fared worse because they ended up reduced to ashes. This was the case of the El Nuevo Rodeo nightclub in Minneapolis, where they worked together providing security services George Floyd and Dereck Chauvin, the police officer accused of suffocating him to death with his knee.
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The building where El Nuevo Rodeo is located, as well as the La Raza 95.7 FM radio station, was burned down around 4:20 am on Friday. The National Guard and police officers could not prevent dozens of buildings from being destroyed those days. It is the epicenter of the protests, because near there Floyd died.
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“Unfortunately I woke up today with my building on fire. It is completely ashes at this time. We lost the radio station, we lost El Nuevo Rodeo ”, regretted its owner Maya Santamaría on Friday in an interview with the program Digital Edition from Univision.
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“Now there is nothing more to say: ‘Please stop destroying the property of the businesses of Latino and African American entrepreneurs,'” Santamaría implored.
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Images of looting in Chicago, New York, Seattle, San Diego, Philadelphia. Long Beach and other cities have traveled around the world. Angry mobs have devastated police patrols as well as clothing stores, pharmacies, supermarkets and even merchandise delivery vehicles.
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The owners of the Attom store in Atlanta posted a video on Instagram in which several young people are seen entering the business, which since 2016 has been selling designer clothes and high-value tennis. They stole everything and smashed its glass facade.
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“I moved to the United States six years ago to make my dream come true (…) As you know, something very sad happened to us,” said one of the owners, the European immigrant Zola Dias. “When I heard about the protests, I thought it would be fine, no one would loot and riot, I had faith in Atlanta. Unfortunately I was wrong, “he added.
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Dias said that after recording the video that was uploaded to social networks, several police officers arrived believing that he was stealing. “Wow, in 2020 it has not yet been heard that a black face owns and operates anything other than a drug operation,” he criticized.
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His partner, Kris Shelby, reported that the sound of gunshots near his apartment woke him up at 1 am Saturday. Four hours later he discovered that the looters had taken all his merchandise.
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“Sorry, it really hurts us,” said the black businessman about George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. “Our plan was to reopen June 1, but for this we will have to wait.”
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Carla Lara, the Mexican jeweler in Los Angeles, said they still did not know if any insurer will cover the damage to their business. He says that it still hurts when he remembers how in a few minutes they destroyed a place that they built with so much effort.
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