Looters leave mess in Albany
County estimates $1M in damage done; city offers aid to owners
Business owners in Albany were cleaning up their looted stores Monday after the area was touched by the civil unrest that took broke out in cities across the nation over the weekend.
The destruction in Albany late Saturday night followed a peaceful daytime protest against the mistreatment by police of black men, including George Floyd, whose death last week while in Minneapolis police custody sparked broad outrage.
There were disturbances in the city’s South End, on Pearl Street and along Washington and Central avenues, including a break-in at Colonie Center on Wolf Road. Businesses — many of them owned by minorities — were vandalized, burglarized and looted, causing more than $1 million worth of damage across the area, Albany County Executive Dan Mccoy said Monday.
The violence came just as businesses were beginning to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
“[The pandemic] is nature. It’s above human control,” said Kwasi Addo-baffour, owner of Breakthrough African Market on Central Avenue. “But this? This is just crazy.”
Addo-baffour was awoken at 2 a.m. Sunday by his alarm company, alerting him to an issue at his market. He arrived to find his front door smashed and cash missing from the register. He spent two hours cleaning up his shop, and though Central Avenue was packed with looters, he said he did not see a single police officer. He wonders if the damage would have been as widespread if officers had made their presence known along the street.
Addo-baffour said he thought his shop would be spared from destruction because it’s a minority-owned business that is clearly labeled as catering to minorities. Surveillance video shows four people breaking into his store. Three of them were white men, he said, and though his door was shattered and his cash gone, the looters left much of the food and goods imported from Africa in his store untouched.
That leads Addo-baffour to believe that the bulk of the looters had nothing to do with the daytime protest or its message.
“This is not a protest,” he said. “This is no justice. If you’re fighting for black life, why would you break into a black store?”
Glass was still missing Monday from the front door of the Boost Mobile operated by Najeeb Khan on Central Avenue. The brick that came crashing through the glass still lay in a corner. Droplets of blood, apparently from a looter, were visible on a display counter that used to hold phones.
The looters took $40,000 worth of phones and his entire cash register, Khan said. He couldn’t speak to the motivation of the group that looted his shop, but said one thing was clear.
“They’re obviously not concerned about humanity,” Khan said. “If they were, they wouldn’t have done this.”
The destruction left much of lower Central Avenue looking like a town bracing for the impact of a Category-5 hurricane. Windows and doors were boarded up, both on businesses that experienced damage this weekend and those anticipating continued unrest.
In an effort to provide some relief to businesses affected by the incidents, Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan announced on Monday that the city’s Small Business Facade Improvement
Program will be waiving the 50 percent match requirement for businesses to receive funding under the program.
“The sun rose on Sunday morning and we saw the damage that was done to small businesses that are really the lifeblood for our community,” Sheehan said. “These are small businesses, many of them owned by people who live here in the city of Albany, many of them minorityowned businesses, and they also provide essential services in neighborhoods that are underserviced. So we want them to be able to reopen quickly. We want to be nimble, we want to be fast.”
Mark Brogna, owner of Capital Wine & Spirits on Lark and State streets, considers himself lucky. His shop was also looted early Sunday morning, but the intruders were able to grab only about five bottles before being spooked by his shop’s alarm.
“It gave up a good fight,” Brogna said of the glass door that was kicked in by the looters. Brogna stayed in his store late Saturday, expecting trouble.
He left just after 2 a.m. His door was kicked in around 3:30.
The confluence of a pandemic and civil unrest could not have come at a worse time for small business owners, he said. “It’s very hard,” Brogna said. “It’s difficult. It’s stressful. It’s worrisome. What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong?” He anticipates keeping the plywood that now reinforces his shop’s windows up until next weekend, at the earliest.
“I take pride in the way the store looks,” Brogna said. “This just looks sad.”
Now, business owners across the region will have to contend with the possibility of more unrest in the upcoming evenings. Addo-baffour, for one, isn’t taking any chances at his shop when night falls.
“I will stay here and defend myself,” he said.