Destructive Crowd of Rioters Hit Courthouse & Financial District

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Late in the evening on Tuesday August 11 a destructive crowd descended on downtown Richmond supposedly in solidarity with recent events in the city of Chicago. The previous Sunday afternoon a Black man in Chicago was severely wounded after allegedly exchanging gunfire with police. According to reports in the Chicago Tribune the shooting scene drew a great deal of attention and confrontations began along the police line.

“Witnesses said a crowd of about 30 people faced off against officers holding a police line near 56th and Aberdeen. Police said a man among the crowd stoked the group’s anger by passing along misinformation, including that police shot a teenage boy. During a scuffle, one officer was hit with pepper spray and a second officer suffered a minor shoulder injury.

A large number of officers cordoned off streets in nearly every direction until the mood of the crowd cooled off. But by that time, Brown said, messages began appearing on social media encouraging people to head downtown.”

With crowds inflamed by the messages spread via social media coordinated looting began in Chicago.

After a second night of unrest and looting in Chicago a mysterious flyer appeared in Richmond and circulated on social media advertising “Autonomous Action” and “Solidarity With Chicago And Every City That Fights Back.” The flyer featured a photo of a burning police car in an unknown city.

A second flyer was released on social media and promoted via an account known as “RichmondStrike”. This social media post advertised “The Existence of Police Is Brutality; Solidarity With Chicago & Every City That Fights Back.” This social media post included instructions to gather at the unusual location of East Broad St & Crane at 9PM. Further the flyer instructed participants to “Mask Up, Wear Black, Be Prepared, Bring a Comrade.”

Around 9:45 PM a crowd of around 50 gathered in the parking lot near the East Broad Street Exxon. According to eyewitness reports much of this crowd followed the instructions of the flyers and were geared up to make identification very difficult.

Around 9:50 PM the crowd moved westward on Broad Street and up the hill into downtown. This crowd carried no signs, chanted “fuck the city, fuck the state, America was never great” as they swiftly moved along East Broad Street into the city center.

At 10 PM the crowd arrived at the John Marshall Richmond City Courthouse where they quickly swarmed the large windows around the entrance and smashed as many as they could with crowbars, bats, bricks and paving stones. By the time authorities could respond the crowd regrouped and moved on.

The whirlwind of destruction turned south and paid a visit to another favorite target of Richmond demonstrators: Dominion Energy. Arriving at the Eight & Main building around 10:10 PM the mob smashed the glass windows and doors of the lobby while vandals blasted the Eighth Street side of the building with graffiti.

With only minutes at the Dominion building the crowd moved on to the heart of the Richmond financial district: The James Center. Around 10:20 PM a mob of vandals crowded around the giant plate glass panels of the James Center complex and smashed away with crowbars, hammers, bricks, stones, and whatever other blunt objects they could find. Dozens of windows were smashed on the complex and neighboring banks with total losses estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Graffiti vandals also visited the banking complex and Starbucks leaving numerous tags on the building facades.

After sufficiently causing chaos in the financial district the mob continued to move eastward where they were met by a line of police equipped in riot gear. The crowd detoured to the north and returned to their starting point dispersing into the alleyways, parking lots and other hidden shadows of the urban downtown.

Before the night was over police made four arrests and confiscated evidence including crowbars, hammers and other tools of vandalism.

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• WRIC 8 - 4 charged after riots in City of Richmond Tuesday night