What is the Culture of Chaos?
"Hell yeah, these shoes are new!" said a looter in Downtown Santa Monica. When asked where he got his chain (not pictured), he smiled and said "the jewelry store." The Latino looter claimed his actions were for justice, and triggered by the long-time discriminatory interactions with police. (Tatiana Louder/The Corsair)
An older black man swept up heaps of shattered glass from the floor of his nail salon. The glass front door of his business had been smashed in the uproar of protesting for justice in the killing of George Floyd that led to property-destructing outbursts in downtown Santa Monica, late Sunday afternoon.
“Guess what it was, from my understanding,” said Ira, owner of a Santa Monica nail salon on Main Street who wished his last name to remain anonymous. “Girls. Girls. Three girls. And guess what. They ain’t through tonight. I don’t know. It makes us [black people] look really bad. We’re harming our own selves doing this kind of stuff.” The salon owner stated that he did not know whether putting up signs in support of the protest would have saved his shop.
Masked faces took stripped-down Lyft scooters to glass doors and windows, largely sparing those who showed visual support for Black Lives Matter on their stores. Police remained on high alert throughout downtown for the evening, but large corporations were a priority for those determined to destroy.
Salons like Ira’s remained vulnerable through the night, while the downtown mall and other big businesses like the CVS on Lincoln and Rose were protected by lines of policemen hours after sundown.
The cleanup from citizens began before the protest property damage was finished. “There’s a dog park there, kids come through here everyday,” a white Santa Monica resident who wished to remain anonymous said. He cleaned away graffiti that read “Fuck 12” and “I can’t breathe.”
“It’s like, I’m down with the cause, but, you know, I’m not down with the vandalism. It’s a two-way street, you know. It started off really mellow, and then I started seeing businesses getting looted and that kind of sucks,” he said.
While the Santa Monica resident worked to remove demonstration-related graffiti from his neighborhood, he wondered about the bigger picture. "This is more about income inequality than race...I didn’t see one person that disagreed with the protest. Not one person," said the Santa Monica resident. "I heard everybody disagree with the looting...the people who want to make it about race are opportunistic just the way people that wanna make it about looting are opportunistic. People want a race war in America, and I’m not having any part of it."
For an anonymous Latino man who joined the looters of Downtown Santa Monica, it's not that looting is happening that is symbolic, but where. "We’re not doing property we use constantly. We’re basically hitting people that got… whatever they need to recreate their shit again. Nah, we ain’t doing mom and pop stores. We need those stores. We’re doing stores that affects them, not us. The next morning, we can wake up, go to the store and shit.”
Though the anonymous looter showed off his goods, he also showed concern for the actions being taken against protestors and looters alike. "Hell yeah, these shoes are new. Shit. I had a chain too, but I took it off…The thing I didn’t like is that they were shooting girls. Like if y’all was just posted [in reference to the female reporter] they would shoot y’all with rubber bullets and all that shit,” said the anonymous man.
While acknowledging the extremity of the actions, he saw the uproar as inevitable in time. "I did it for the cause. Everybody gets tired of that shit. If you live in the hood, you get tired of that shit," said the man. The man also said he had been harassed by officers the previous week after being pulled over while driving in El Monte.
After nightfall, once the police had regained armed control over most of the Mall's perimeter, an anonymous adolescent boy saw figures slip into the gated barrier on the Bloomingdale's side of the shopping center. "They hopped the fence," he said, "two." The rest of the teenage protestors stood around, empty handed, save for signs but still in awe. The boy said, "Look if you steal something that’s like a [Rolex] watch: $50,000."
