ABC News reporter covering Hurricane Harvey gets slammed online after reporting alleged looters to police

[Restored]

I imagine the problem was that it wasn't NeoNazis doing the looting.

[Smokin Joe]

I imagine the problem was that it wasn't NeoNazis doing the looting.

LOL! Antifa are the Communist counterpart to the Nazis, reinvented for a generation that doesn't know enough history to avoid repeating it.

[The_Reader_David]

I am always of two minds about looting during natural disasters. 

On the one hand theft is wrong, and stealing from persons absent who are suffering from a disaster is, moreover,  low and cowardly in a way that, for instance, armed robbery or even embezzlement is not.

On the other hand, if the inventory taken was about to be destroyed or (declared a total loss by an insurer, even if not destroyed), whether directly by flood waters, or indirectly through lack of refrigeration, the owner is no worse off if it is, instead, taken by someone who can use it.  I think one can make a case that our Founding Fathers might have recognized as valid, on the basis of Lockean property theory, that the appropriation of goods which have been rendered useless to their owner is not, in fact, theft, but appropriation from common.

[Smokin Joe]

I am always of two minds about looting during natural disasters. 

On the one hand theft is wrong, and stealing from persons absent who are suffering from a disaster is, moreover,  low and cowardly in a way that, for instance, armed robbery or even embezzlement is not.

On the other hand, if the inventory taken was about to be destroyed or (declared a total loss by an insurer, even if not destroyed), whether directly by flood waters, or indirectly through lack of refrigeration, the owner is no worse off if it is, instead, taken by someone who can use it.  I think one can make a case that our Founding Fathers might have recognized as valid, on the basis of Lockean property theory, that the appropriation of goods which have been rendered useless to their owner is not, in fact, theft, but appropriation from common.

I would draw a distinction between foraging for food and looting (stealing things which have little or no survival value).
Keep in mind, too, that floodwaters are often loaded with fecal matter and other nasty things which promote disease, and I'd go so far as to look the other way if someone had a bottle of bleach and a pot to boil water in.

Someone coming out of a grocery store with canned goods is one thing, someone climbing out of a jewelers' shop with a sack of bling is another. I also fail to see where a 55 inch TV is an essential item for survival, especially when the power is out.

[EasyAce]

I would draw a distinction between foraging for food and looting (stealing things which have little or no survival value).

@Smokin Joe
As would I. I should have made that more clear earlier.

[Machiavelli]

ABC reporter Tom Llamas slammed as a snitch for calling police on Houston ‘looters’

Shawn Langlois
MarketWatch
August 30, 2017

Tom Llamas is not the hero Houston needs right now, according to how some of his dispatches were received on Tuesday morning.

The ABC News reporter, using the #BREAKING hashtag, told his followers that he saw “looting” taking place at a supermarket in the northeast part of the city, an area grappling with catastrophic floods and supply shortages.

And that there was a dead body nearby. In that order.

He was immediately met with a heavy dose of internet WTF:

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