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Arrests for looting from crowds (12)
Officers had to come from some distance to make those arresst – from cars patrolling the streets, from positions on intersections or from guarding stores across the street. As a result, officers often fired guns at suspected looters – both the individuals police killed, Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, allegedly had been seen looting – and did not get to the scene in time to arrest all those involved before they ran off.
On only two of the twelve occasions police saw crowds taking goods from stores is there evidence that they arrested several people at the same time, three men at the A & P grocery store at 510 Lenox Avenue and two men at 1916 7th Avenue. In the other ten cases officers arrests only one member of the crowd.
There are two other police officers that the Magistrates Court docket book records as each having arrested three men at the same address, the Romanoff Drug Store at 375 Lenox Avenue and the Butler Food Market at 1974 7th Avenue, likely indicating they were arrested at the same time, but no sources provide details of those arrests. (More than one person was arrested for looting four other stores, at 372 Lenox Avenue, 374 Lenox Avenue, 400 Lenox Avenue, and 200 West 128th Street, but those arrests came at different times).