‘Looting' deemed racist term,
California experiencing 'organized robbery'
What happened in California this weekend when over $1 million in luxury goods were stolen was not "looting," authorities said.
Calling it "looting" might be racist, they said.
Instead, what happened was "organized robbery," according to a spokesperson for the San Diego Police Department.
San Diego officials are not alone in this sentiment.
"As the Bay Area grapples with a wave of seemingly organized smash and grab robberies this weekend, policing and journalism analysts are cautioning against the use of the term looting," a report said.
In San Francisco , Louis Vuitton and Burberry stores were burglarized and lost a significant amount of their product, the report said.
Similar incidents occurred in San Jose, Santana Row, Hayward, and Walnut Creek, with waves of people storming into stores, causing extreme losses.
However, these events are not considered looting, according to the California Penal Code, which defines looting as "theft or burglary ... during a 'state of emergency,' 'local emergency,' or 'evacuation order' resulting from an earthquake, fire, flood, riot or other natural or manmade disaster."
Calling the events in California looting carries a racist sentiment, said Lorenzo Boyd, a professor of criminal justice and community policing at the University of New Haven and a former police officer.
"Looting is a term that we typically use when people of color or urban dwellers are doing something," he said. "We tend not to use that term for other people when they do the exact same thing."
The public should also be wary of drawing a political connection between this weekend's "smash-and-grabs" and the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, Boyd said.
"These types of massive, organized smash-and-grabs were happening before the Rittenhouse situation because it happens cyclically," he said. "It's a false equivalency. It's people trying to politicize crime."
Martin Reynolds, co-executive director of the Robert C. Maynard Institute of Journalism Education, echoed Boyd's notion that proper media literacy is essential to address the complicated issues facing society.
"People draw their own conclusions if the terminologies that you use are tethered to people's understanding of how they have been used in the past," he said.