“Flash mob” thieves target US retail stores Black Friday By Reuters

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Black Friday shoppers weren’t the only ones looking for cheap ones the day after Thanksgiving. The thieves were also busy.

Police in Los Angeles and other cities across the country spent much of their holiday weekend patrol on Friday looking for suspects in numerous “flash mob” robberies as part of a U.S. crime trend spread by gangs of thieves in a store. on the shelves and run away.

Authorities have also used the term “smash-and-grab” to describe the trend.

At least two such robberies were reported Saturday by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. A local TV station, KCAL-TV, reported a total of six break-ins and catches on Friday just west of the city.

In one incident, a group of eight men entered Home Depot (NYSE 🙂 At a shopping center in Lakewood, south of downtown Los Angeles, he walked straight to the tool walkway and grabbed a bunch of hammers, hammers and levers worth about $ 400 before fleeing, the sheriff’s office said.

According to the KTTV LA television channel, 20 suspects were involved in the robbery at the Home Depot on Friday night, approached the store in 10 cars and wore ski masks before entering the passage of the tool.

“We tried to stop them,” Luis Romo, a store employee, told KTTV. “We closed the front entrance, and whoever put the mallets up and obstructed them would hurt them.”

Los Angeles City News Service said four suspects in the robbery were arrested Saturday by police in Beverly Hills.

In a similar incident on Friday evening, a group of 10 or more men raided a store in the city’s Fairfax district and began seizing goods without pay, diverting workers from the road before fleeing the scene, according to the LAPD.

Police are investigating possible links between the incident and other burglaries and retail robberies on Friday and earlier in the week, including two reported breakups on Wednesday, a LAPD spokesman said.

The eruption of retail crime prompted the LAPD to put its officers on a tactical alert for the entire city on Friday evening.

Mass robberies were also reported Friday at two Best Buy electronics stores in Minneapolis-St. In the Paul area, one of them involved 30 suspects while they were investigating retail robberies before dawn in Chicago.

In one of the largest flash-mob robberies reported on the West Coast in recent days, police in the San Francisco neighborhood of Walnut Creek were searching a large store last Saturday and were searching for about 80 suspects.