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Looting by crowds
In one form of looting in the context of a crowd, individuals joined others in taking merchandise from damaged stores. Arnold Ford, pleading guilty, said he had joined others entering Harry Lash’s store, "helping himself to some merchandise." That brief description suggests a flow of people entering a store whose doors and windows had suffered significant damage, without the presence of police and threat of arrest. Ford was able to pick out a package of items, leave the store, and walk more than five blocks towards his home before being stopped by a police officer. He gave no indication that he collaborated with others to enter and loot the store; instead, he followed what others were doing sometime after the store had been attacked. However, Leroy Gillard and Lawrence Humphrey, who likewise entered a damaged store with others, did encounter police as they left and were arrested.
Crowds also provided a context for picking up goods thrown into the street. Charles Saunders claimed he followed the lead of those in the crowd around him in front of Ralph Sirico’s store when he picked up a pair of shoes and headed home. In this case, there is an element of collaboration, as Saunders described shoes and hats being thrown through the broken window of onto 7th Avenue as people in the crowd that gathered in front of the store picked them up. Saunders (Detective Jeremiah Duross alleged Saunders was actually at the center of this looting, jumping out of the window as he pulled up in his patrol car, making him responsible for throwing merchandise into the street – but not breaking the windows, which had been done hours earlier). Other sources suggest that goods were also thrown into the street as part of attacking a store more than looting it, and were not always picked up immediately. According to the Afro-American's reporter, "There was stealing from some of the store windows, especially having men’s wear but generally the goods was dragged on the wet sidewalk and destroyed." Similarly, the New York Times, in the only mention of looting in its story on the disorder, noted that "In many instances the merchandise of fruit and grocery and butchers’ shops was taken out of the broken windows and strewn on the sidewalks." Lying in the street, items had a somewhat liminal status, their distance from the store, outside its walls/boundaries, introducing some uncertainty about their ownership (although much of merchandise was near to a store). Picking up those items was not as clearly criminal, and attracted less attention, than entering a store.
More of the looting involving groups of people described by police officers and storeowners involved breaking and entering, not taking goods from damaged stores. The noise of breaking windows attracted police attention, so the relatively greater prevalence of such cases does not necessarily indicate that most looting took this form, only that it attracted more police attention (the police officers who shot and killed Lloyd Hobbs also claimed that they had seen him throw a stone through a store window, although witnesses suggest that it was the crowd milling around on the street that attracted their attention). In most of those cases, observers described groups larger enough to be called crowds; thirty or forty people looting Feinstein’s liquor store and groups larger enough not to have their size specified taking merchandise from Avitable’s food market, Piskin’s laundry, Chronis’ lunchroom, Jack Garmise’s cigar store, a chain grocery store, and Sarah Refkin’s delicatessen. The remaining cases involved smaller groups: five people at Sol Weit and Isaac Popiel's grocery store, four men at Young’s hardware store, and six men at Pravia’s candy store. In three cases, multiple people participated in breaking into a store, with thirty to forty at Feinstein’s liquor store, six people at Pravia’s candy store, and at least two men at a chain grocery store. Small groups indicate the fractured nature of the disorder after it left West 125th Street, the presence of many groups rather a large crowd moving together.
In five cases, in smaller groups, an individual is described as breaking a window, with the group then entering the store. A brick or stone was thrown through a window of Greenfield auto equipment store and Young’s hardware store, and a trashcan through the window of Jack Garmise’s cigar store. A hammer was used to break the window of Sol Weit and Isaac Popiel's grocery store; and someone kicked in the window of Sarah Refkin’s delicatessen. An individual who broke into a store risked harsher penalties than those who took advantage of that damage to enter a store, but police generally struggled to distinguish and arrest those individuals when they responded to attacks on stores.