Police are investigating whether shoppers were provoked to ransack the store near San Francisco’s Union Square in the early hours of Saturday morning
Police are investigating whether shoppers were provoked to ransack a Nordstrom store near San Francisco’s Union Square in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Police in San Francisco, California, said they responded to the scene about 1.10am after receiving reports of a mall confrontation in which the “rumoured crowd” threw objects at each other and then opened up a display case in the department store.
Paul Rose, a police spokesman, said the unidentified suspects were taken into custody on suspicion of “malicious mischief and destruction of property”.
He said that the damage, estimated at $300, did not cause any serious injury to anyone.
Police were continuing to investigate whether anything was provoked in the confrontation, Rose said.
KTVU-TV, a local ABC affiliate, reported that it received video of a group of people “throwing items from racks and escalators” outside the store.
“They looked like the city was in the midst of a riot,” one witness told the news station. “The footage is jarring, but it does give us a snapshot of the chaos”.
San Francisco has a long history of wild cities with broken windows and sporadic parties that occasionally turn violent.
A similar incident happened in November last year at a department store in the Brooklyn district of New York, when police said about a hundred people began throwing items at each other after a midnight protest outside a mall and questioned whether mall security guards may have provoked the group.
Gerald Buck, a spokesman for the New York police department, said the group of about 100 people began to argue and argue on Saturday morning, with one shopper appearing to threaten another person.
He said the group then began pelting police officers, who ended up with small cuts from broken glass and scratches on their hands from falling debris. Police responded to the scene and were able to disperse the crowd. No arrests were made.