“It was chaos and mass destruction,” observed Gant Hill, an eye witness to activity that occurred alongside the protests in Louisville on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. Gant owns Gant Hill & Associates, a real estate brokerage and property management company, and lives downtown. (Full disclosure: Gant is my son.)
From their vantage point, Gant and others who work and live downtown saw multiple episodes of suspicious activity, looting, and vandalism during the protests. At one point Gant observed a group of men emerge from large vehicles with out-of-state plates, dressed in black with black face coverings and carrying backpacks. “They headed into the crowds to begin destroying shops and other property,” he said. “My colleague saw another van let men out and then pick them up later. I and many others saw the guy destroying windows at one restaurant, and later saw other people dressed like him downtown.”
One man who works in the area (who asked to remain anonymous) reports seeing teams of identically black-clad men methodically smashing windows of stores along Broadway. They were then followed up by ragtag groups of opportunistic looters who jumped through the broken glass to grab whatever they could. The man said he was disappointed to see that some of the looters were residents of the area, who didn’t seem to grasp how damaging their destruction was to those who depend on or work at the stores and the grocery they were damaging. At the same time, he was struck with how coordinated the initial attacks appeared to be. He said the black-clad men, who seemed to be coordinating their maneuvers via social media, would hide scooters or cars in nearby lots for hasty escapes.
Peace and justice advocate Christopher 2X, executive director of 2xgamechangers.org and a Broadway area resident, said he was out with the young people of the area on Friday night trying to calm the situation. “We were trying to get them to see how their message could get diluted (with vandalism). Unfortunately some protestors broke off from the group, who were trying to do the right thing.”
While local shop owners and residents made repeated calls to law enforcement, the police presence was scarce in the Broadway area on Friday and Saturday nights. “The police finally came early Sunday morning, while people were still harassing us,” Gant said.
As he surveyed the damage, Gant, whose company has 500 apartments in the Louisville area, said he was surprised at the level of destruction.
“More than the cost of repairing windows and doors and eliminating graffiti, there is the cost of lost confidence in our downtown. The people who experienced this first hand have been impacted by the attacks to their home. We fear that people may leave the city, after decades of making downtown a desirable place to live.”
Yet Gant already sees positive progress on that front. “The city aggressively removed the graffiti on our buildings and those downtown. The removal of tags on people’s businesses and homes is a great way for us to begin to heal and make way for peaceful protests.”
Christopher 2X notes that Mayor Fischer and Interim LMPD Police Chief Schroeder have been interacting with protestors in Jefferson Square since Tuesday. “This is a great start,” he says. “But I don’t anticipate the protestors leaving until there is progress on the no-knock Breonna’s Law.”
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