Published 09:14 IST, July 20th 2020
Rioters loot Amazon Go store in Seattle; Trump Jr calls them 'undocumented shoppers'
Black Lives Matter protestors looted an Amazon Go store in Seattle on July 19. The Seattle Police Dept also stated rioters set a corner of the precinct on fire.
Black Lives Matter protestors were reportedly seen damaging and looting stores in the middle of their rally in Seattle on Sunday, July 19, as city police were seen blocking off entrances to Interstate entries so rioters could not enter or leave the area without being noticed.
Seattle Police Dept on Sunday stated that protestors broke out several windows of the East City Precinct and threw "devices" into the lobby that ignited a small fire in the station. The fire was quickly extinguished and no injuries were reported, the police stated in their tweet.
Donald Trump Jr also took the opportunity to attack Biden and the BLM protests, while sharing a video of the riots masked as demonstrations, he rankled the opposition by stating these rioters were in fact "undocumented shoppers".
Following the incident at the police precinct, protestors moved to the Downtown area, along with Antifa members riding around in armed cars and trucks wreaking havoc in the city.
In the middle of all this, BLM protestors broke into an Amazon Go store in Downtown Seattle, after which the protest turned into a full-fledged riot.
The developing incident resulted in the police unit tweeting that a large crowd had gathered in the city square outside its West Precinct and demonstrators were throwing rocks and other potentially harmful object sat officers and that at least one officer has been taken to the hospital.
Police said demonstrators had gone from Westlake Park to the Municipal Courthouse and then headed back north to the West precinct "leaving behind a trail of property destruction."
"These are criminal acts, not peaceful protests," police said.
A similar incident had occurred in Seattle on June 9, also amidst BLM protests, when another Amazon Go store was targetted and looted. A report shared on Reddit claimed that the Amazon store was vandalised and several items were carted away but it turned out that the store's scanning system which lets people in after scanning the barcode on their phone's app, along with their camera and motion sensors was able to identify the miscreants.
The protestors were then reportedly "automatically billed" for the items that they allegedly looted. Currently, Notably, Amazon Go has 21 stores across four locations in the US: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle. The last one has borne the brunt of repeated attacks in the protests.
The BLM protestors are a reaction to the George Floyd murder.
Floyd, 46, on Monday, May 25 was detained for questioning regarding a possible crime in progress. The incident which was caught on video showed a police officer identified as Derek Chauvin pinning Floyd down to the ground when things escalated and holding his knee to Floyd's neck for more than 5 minutes as he continued to interrogate him.
The video which sparked outrage in the US, also shows Floyd pleading in his last moment with the officer to let him go, as he could not breathe. The accused police officer has now been charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter in the death of George Floyd.
Updated 09:14 IST, July 20th 2020