Organized Riot Groups Team Up With Organized Criminal Groups: How Luxury Brand Products are Being Targeted During Urban Unrest
Like diamonds sparkling under the moonlight shining across the dark ground…. Sounds like the opening line of a Pacific Island romance novel, does it not? Well, it is not. It was the impression I had gazing over the photos when the trance was shattered by the phone ringing with an anxious client calling from New York. That is the image my mind created until the phone call disturbed my revery. And what was it that I was viewing that conjured up that lovely fantasy?
Broken glass. Shattered windows. Shiny beads of thick expensive storefront glass strewn over block after block across the city’s sidewalks and blacktop while assessing damage in June 2020. The paradise island in my mind was not in the South Pacific. Instead, this island was in the North Atlantic, Manhattan to be precise. New York City.
After compiling the long list of damaged and looted stores I started the damage assessment to get to the bottom of the extent of losses to the retail companies, the landlords and the building owners resulting from the civil unrest and street demonstrations turned riot.
The finished work product would include recommendations to harden the targets by considering all manner of private security products and services. Early on in the course of this engagement I made an observation that had eluded me because of the many blocks of damage I had witnessed and photographed. After viewing dozens of storefronts from after action photos, one fact became crystal clear. The vast majority of those businesses looted and destroyed in those nights of unbridled rage were retail stores and more specifically, luxury brand retailers.
Pick your brand: Gucci, Channel, Rolex, Dior, Hermes, Coach, and Louis Vuitton to name a few. It seems that the same qualities and features that make these coveted brands so popular and valuable also make their shops and stores a high-priority target for protesters turned rioters turned larcenists. And worse, arsonists.
Another glaring fact seemed to jump out of these photos. Many of the victimized stores had some sort of physical barrier. There were attractive steel grate systems. Some utilized roll-down shutters. Others had solid steel doors that locked over each other and were secured with massive locks. What did all of these measures have in common? In many locations, they were breached, and the defeated stores were burglarized and vandalized. How is this possible?
Various public and private intelligence agencies and companies have discovered that in a broadening crime wave, some organized protest groups are collaborating with organized criminal gangs to support the other’s agenda. How does that work?
The criminal theft gangs support the faux protesters who use legitimate protest events, such as political statements, or to redress a pressing social issue, or in response to a violent police action, to accelerate the legitimate protest into an anarchical riot. Unfortunately, some of those who join the protest to express their legitimate concern are frequently swept up into the cauldron of a riot and find themselves recklessly participating in rioting, vandalism, larceny, and even violence towards law enforcement officers or members of an opposing protest group. Sigmund Freud addressed this phenomenon in ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’.
The ultimate outcome of this study of retail losses due to rioting in the coming decade concluded with a few absolutes.
First, the benefit of each party in this burgeoning cooperation is clear. This unholy marriage is between true rioters and criminal gangs. For rioters, the primary motivation in a protest is to promulgate social and political discord and to damage and destroy public and private property. For the criminal gangs, the primary motivation in a riot is to steal high-end luxury brand products from as many locations as possible. This requires numerous vehicles.
Using violence, including arson during an upheaval, the rioters draw all resources of personnel and equipment from local law enforcement agencies. This allows marauding gangs using vehicles (most police are on foot in a riot), to have a mechanized battering ram (the bumper), to haul a great many stolen products from stores, and vandalize and loot practically at will and without intervention by police, as they are spread out across the city.
Second, past retail security systems including alarm systems, CCTV, metallic bars, grates, and doors that were successful for many decades prior to 2020 can no longer be trusted to provide absolute security. By the nature of its setting and clientele, a luxury brand storefront is likely going to appear elegant and inviting, and easily breached.
Prior to the advent of the professional rioter/larcenist network that many believe appeared sometime in 2015, the focus of rioters was on destruction. The theft was a mere afterthought. Plus, in the early decades of political unrest and rioting, many riots took place in less advantaged inner-city neighborhoods. With few opportunities for automobile travel, much of the destruction was confined to local neighborhoods. Higher-end retailers were miles away.
Not only have traditional physical systems become less effective, but our public safety departments are sometimes scuttled to the point where they cannot provide the human power in a timely manner needed to tamp down the civil unrest before it reaches the point of mass destruction. Add to that an often anemic political response to widespread lawlessness and destruction you we have what is essentially an open city unable to stop the widespread losses.
Private security forces are even less able to positively impact the outcome of these upheavals. Typical private agencies and security officers have neither the training, the equipment, nor the mission to keep an angry mob from targeting and destroying an individual place of business, particularly a luxury brand storefront. They are appropriate on post as a deterrent to poor behavior in times of peace and quiet; not so when targeted by scores of agitated individuals bent on taking the property belonging to others.
Acting as a stand-by force, at ArkForce we strategically position ourselves in front of our clients’ storefronts, offering our services only when the need arises during times of civil unrest, mass protests and riots. With our elite ArkForce Team Members you can trust in our commitment to safeguard your assets and ensure the continuity of your business operations during episodes of social unrest and riots.