NYC Cops Chasing A Boogeyman in Dark Neighborhoods and Alley Ways
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
There were reports of looting at a Rent-A-Center in Coney Island.
By MICHAEL WILSON
In the days after the landfall of Hurricane Sandy, nine New York City police officers and state parole officers collected the names and addresses of 40 convicted felons who were on parole and living in neighborhoods gone dark from blackouts.
The officers knocked on their doors “to remind them we’re looking at them,” said Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman. “We think some might be responsible for burglaries, and we want to make sure the other ones know we’re out there and looking to suppress any burglaries that are ongoing.”
The hunt was on for that most deeply despised boogeyman who creeps in behind catastrophes: the looter, here to prey on the helpless huddled in the dark. And the police were not the only ones on the lookout.
News photographs around the city and the region showed handmade signs in front of buildings and houses, with threats to shoot any looters, or dump them in a river, or crucify them, or some combination therein.
So how many looters were there? The short answer seems to be not many. The police reported a 6 percent rise in burglaries for the week of the storm in the city, against an overall drop in crime in general. There were 379 burglaries from Oct. 29, when the storm arrived, through the following Sunday, the police said. That is 22 more burglaries than the same week last year. And yet, those are figures that many seem to doubt, as anecdotes of looters outnumber the ones on police reports.
Take Richard Chan, who, when The Associated Press found him this week, was holed up in his home on Staten Island — with a sword. “A replica of a samurai sword,” he told me a little later. Regarding looting, “there was enough that I heard about,” he said, adding that he had seen a stranger in black knocking on a neighbor’s window the day after the storm. When Mr. Chan called out to the man, he fled.
The police said there were 10 arrests for four burglaries on Staten Island in four days after the storm. Half of those suspects were accused of breaking into the same house together on Martineau Street. “In terms of wholesale looting,” Mr. Browne said, “we didn’t see it.”
There was looting in the Rockaways in Queens and on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, Brooklyn, where a typical case looked like this:
A police officer saw a young man break into a dark convenience store the morning after the storm, wearing “a hooded sweatshirt fitted closely to defendant’s body with nothing bulging or protruding,” according to a criminal complaint.
The man emerged from the store with “pockets bulging and overflowing with various items.” Among them: Kit-Kat bars, Twix bars, Snickers bars, a Sterno candle and $10.57 in loose change, according to the complaint.
The man, Jakik Banks, 17, was arrested and charged with burglary and other crimes. “A guy named Dostoyevsky wrote a pretty good story about that, didn’t he?” said his defense lawyer, Philip J. Smallman, who suggested the charges were overly harsh because the defendant was considered to be looting.
Later that Tuesday, a 51-year-old man was arrested on a charge of stealing from the same store, taking four flashlights and $427.96 that, presumably, Mr. Banks had left behind, a complaint in that case states. Around the same time, a teenager was caught outside a store nearby with a flashlight and $15 that the police said he stole, telling officers that he was making sure everything was O.K. in there.
Three men were arrested after officers saw them lugging something heavy down Mermaid. It turned out to be a small safe. Officers broke open the safe, found a pistol inside and charged the men with possession of a weapon. No one has come forward to report the gun being stolen.
The most blatant story of looting that day is something of a mystery. Two managers at a Rent-A-Center on Mermaid, as well as several people who live nearby, have told me that burglars came through the store’s broken windows and made off with televisions, laptops and video games. But the police said no such crime had been reported as of Friday. “We expect there will be more burglaries reported as people come back,” Mr. Browne said.
It was unclear Friday how many of those 40 convicted felons on parole — among them burglars and murderers — were home when the police came knocking or how many crimes were prevented by this tactic, which continues “as we speak,” Mr. Browne said. But one statistic stands at zero: the number of reported crucifixions since the storm.
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