AMERICA IN CHAOS
Looters hoard bricks to attack cops, says Shea
Looters have hoarded bricks to throw at unsuspecting cops, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said Wednesday.
Shea said that the wouldbe weapons were picked up by protesters on the way to Manhattan, where they were thrown at cops trying to keep the peace in the George Floyd demonstrations. He shared a video on Twitter showing a cache of blue plastic bins filled with debris that had been left on a streetcorner.
But a local elected official questioned Shea’s narrative Wednesday, saying the debris Shea tweeted about was next to a construction site and not linked to looting.
“Unfortunately this is not an isolated incident,” Shea said during a presser with Mayor de Blasio.
“There were two locations, one was in Brooklyn and one was in Queens. The prestaged bricks are being placed and then transported to quote unquote peaceful protests — which are peaceful protests — but then used by that criminal group within to sow fear.”
City Councilman Mark Treyger (D-Brooklyn), went down to one of the sites, on
Avenue X and E. Fourth St. in Gravesend, which is part of his district, and said Shea did not include the full story of what happened.
“You can logically infer that there’s a construction site nearby, and there’s some construction debris nearby,” he said. “I thought [Shea] really had a responsibility to really state the entire story and facts here, and the fact is that these containers, from what I observed, it appears to be construction debris.”
“I think that he needed to mention that as opposed to implying that there was some sort of organized looting or riots when, in fact, I was out in my district last night until very late and I saw no evidence of looting on Avenue X,” he added.
“So I was very disturbed by the commissioner’s tweet. It did not state the full story of what exactly happened.”
Shea said that the NYPD has seen an uptick in burglaries at construction sites in Manhattan over the last week where one of the few items taken were bricks, which he believe were used by looters.
“A burglary at a construction site is not all that uncommon, but during a riot it was interesting what was taken — bricks,” he said.