‘It’s wiped out.’ Sacramento cleans up after looting, worries about more protests

After a night of looting, the mayor of Sacramento toured a devastated Macy’s store Sunday morning, volunteers scrubbed graffiti and Sarah Swanson was in tears.

Cleaning up Eyes on J, her downtown optometry shop, she struggled to absorb the damage done by looters following a demonstration against police brutality: eyeglasses stolen, window panes shattered, spent cigarettes and other trash left behind.

“I mean, I’m sympathetic to their cause,” said Swanson, who had planned to reopen Monday after two months of coronavirus shutdown. “I know why people are upset. Just taking it to this level, it’s just a little bit much.” She now doesn’t know when the store will reopen.

Dozens of looters rampaged through downtown and midtown late Saturday night after hours of protesting the death of unarmed black man George Floyd in Minneapolis. Many in Sacramento awoke Sunday dazed, worried about another round of violence and, in some cases, questioning how police handled the incident.

At the downtown Macy’s, the first store to be hit by looters, Mayor Darrell Steinberg toured the destruction with Michael Ault, head of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership business association.

“Macy’s is devastated,” Ault said. “It’s wiped out.” He said glass display cases were shattered and the sprinklers went off after the looters lit a fire inside the building.” He said the store, which was on the verge of reopening after the COVID-19 shutdown, now is likely weeks away from greeting customers again.

“We’re wondering about Round 2. What will they do?” Ault added, referring to the expectation of more protests later Sunday.

At Macy’s, Steve Barton was already sweating at 7:30 a.m. as he and a co-worker from Gray Construction were boarding up a dozen smashed windows. Gray employees were preparing to fan out to Frank Fat’s restaurant nearby and the BevMo store in midtown to repair damage there.

“We’re in such a hurry,” Barton said. “So many businesses have been compromised, we’re getting as much done as we can quickly.”

Some business leaders questioned the police department’s response to the looting. A Sacramento Bee reporter witnessed nearly a dozen officers on bicycles arrive after looters smashed their way into the Kicx Unlimited sneaker store downtown. The officers didn’t arrest anyone as they ran away, carrying out armfuls of merchandise and more groups arrived later to pilfer the store again and again.

“The amount of people (protesters) down here made it a challenge, but we need to protect the city,” Ault said. “There may be more to come. It makes you question whether we were able to do enough.”

But Steinberg, who was with Police Chief Daniel Hahn throughout Saturday night, said he wouldn’t second-guess the police. He said the police had to be careful about reacting too quickly and perhaps inciting more violence.

“The police in Sacramento are in a precarious and difficult position on how to respond,” the mayor said.

A phalanx of officers eventually dispersed the crowd at around 2 a.m. Sunday in the vicinity of 25th and J streets, nearly five hours after the looters struck Macy’s.

The looting was criticized by Sequita Thompson, the grandmother of Stephon Clark — the unarmed black man whose shooting death by police sparked days of intense protests in 2018 and a year later when the officers weren’t prosecuted.

”I don’t think that’s right for us to be doing things like that ... destroying property,” said Thompson. “I didn’t think Sacramento would go that far.

“It’s not worth it to get hurt. We’ve already been hurt,” she said. “I don’t like violence, I like a peaceful protest.”

The demonstrators left a trail of graffiti from the Tower Bridge to 26th Street. Smashed windows and anti-police graffiti were all over J Street and many side streets Sunday morning. “Dead Cops. Dead Cops,” was spray painted on the wall of a retail complex that houses See’s candy shop.

At Mike’s Camera shop, looters smashed the window but were prevented by a steel gate from getting inside. Manager Mike Quiggin, who arrived early Sunday, said the gate saved tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise.

“It was extremely terrifying,” he said, recalling watching live coverage of the looting on The Sacramento Bee’s website.

As for the police, he said, “I think they did an absolutely amazing job .... They did the best they could to make sure everyone was as safe as they could be.”

Outside the camera shop, midtown resident Barbara Mendeola, 62, stopped by shortly after 6 a.m. with a dustpan and broom to help clean up the glass. She said she was sympathetic to the protesters’ grievances about police conduct. “If there wasn’t such a military response by the cops all the time, I think things would be a hell of a lot different,” she said.

Another volunteer, Clark Jorgensen, found what appeared to be the remnant of a rubber bullet, a souvenir of the steps police took to quell the looting.

“It felt like a war zone,” said Jorgensen, who lives three blocks away. “In my house, I heard loud bangs, people screaming, police shouting. It was just like a war zone.”

Another Good Samaritan, Jack Haskel, had a garbage bag full of broken glass as he walked along J Street. “I just found a Grey Goose bottle,” he said, surmising that it may have been swiped from BevMo.

The main Lofing’s lighting shop had its windows tagged with graffiti. The Lofing’s annex across the street had its window smashed but nothing was taken.

“It’s kind of frustrating because we’ve been a local business for 58 years,” said owner Wendy Lofing-Rossotti, who was using lacquer thinner to remove the graffiti. She planned to have windows of both stores boarded up in case more protests erupted later in the day.

She questioned the police department’s response. “I think it should have been stopped earlier,” she said. “Maybe barricades, and make them turn, make them go back.”

Wild Poppy & Co. clothing boutique on J Street suffered no damage but owner Cory Spencer wasn’t taking any chances. She came to the store Sunday to remove her cash register and other items. “We’re taking everything out,” she said. “We’re going to try to board up the windows.”

A street sign designating bike lanes had been uprooted in the night and dumped on the porch of the Lioness Building, a J Street building that houses fitness studios. Later Sunday morning, someone removed it from the porch and placed it on the grass. Someone spray-painted “F--- Da Cops” on the window of Mojo salon, but caused no other damage. Taggers left their mark on Kulture, a Mexican-American gift shop on 24th Street, and in the alley behind Relles Florist.

On 22nd Street, vandals smashed in the window of an office that’s in the process of being converted to a design studio. “What can you do?” said the incoming tenant, who declined to give his name.

By the Capitol, the Stanley Mosk Library and Courts Building was covered in anti-police graffiti. Greg Brening of Loomis was helping clean graffiti off the California Peace Officers’ Memorial, a statue dedicated to law enforcement.

“It’s just our duty,” said Brening, whose sister-in-law is a Sacramento city police officer. “When you desecrate a memorial like this, it’s important to send a message to the officers, that we respect, we honor and we love them for what they do.”

Brening was one of dozens of people who swarmed the downtown area all morning, clutching brooms and garbage bags and volunteering to scrub anti-police slogans off buildings.

Among them was Aref Aziz, 28, a midtown resident who joined the protests Saturday, left before the looting began, and returned with a broom at 6 a.m. to help clean up in front of a downtown 7-Eleven that had been thoroughly ransacked.

“We’re here this morning because you know we saw a lot of what was going on late last night as a protest got violent with all the destruction in our city,” he said. “We residents randomly showed up at 6 a.m. and just started cleaning. As we ran into each other we grouped up just to make things a little bit better for everybody that lives here. We respect the beauty of Sacramento. We understand so many of our young people are so angry and rightfully.”

For all the damage, there were signs of normalcy. The Cornerstone Cafe on J Street, a few doors down from the smashed-in window of Lofing’s, was open for breakfast. So was Peet’s Coffee a few blocks away.

Over in Land Park, the Target store, hit by looters late Saturday, was open Sunday and the parking lot was quickly filling up. The store was determined to reopen even though the Target corporation had announced the night before that the store, along with many others across the country, would be temporarily closing.

The glass door that had been smashed was boarded up. A manager said the store was still conducting inventory to determine how much had been stolen.

This story was originally published May 31, 2020 at 11:20 AM.