Mayor Bill de Blasio and his top police official faced sharp criticism on Tuesday and vowed to alter their tactics after thousands of officers were unable to prevent bands of looters from breaking into businesses across the city, including Macy’s flagship store in Herald Square and other well-known stores in Midtown Manhattan.
Even some senior members of the department privately acknowledged that the police had been overwhelmed by the number of looting incidents and the logistics of keeping ahead of the steady stream of reported break-ins for a second night.
“The radio was nonstop all night with cops asking for backup,” said one police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Much of the help, the official added, never arrived, allowing looters to move on to other targets.
Mr. de Blasio and his police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, acknowledged that the department’s response to the turmoil Monday was flawed and that widespread looting had taken place as many officers were dispatched to oversee what turned out to be largely peaceful demonstrations.
City Councilman Rory Lancman, the chairman of the Committee on the Justice System, said the police had failed to stop crimes from being committed and had been overly aggressive in controlling legitimate protest. “The buck falls squarely with the mayor — it’s his police force,” Mr. Lancman said.
While it remained unclear precisely how the police planned to retool their approach, Mr. de Blasio said he would impose an 8 p.m. curfew on Tuesday — three hours earlier than Monday — and called on local clergy and community leaders to take an increased role in protecting their own neighborhoods.
He also promised to re-examine the strategy his police department has used to deal with the worst public chaos to hit New York since the citywide blackout of 1977. The department issued a memo canceling all days off for its officers.
“There’s a lot of things that have to be done better, a lot of things have to be fixed,” Mr. de Blasio said. “And that’s the work we will do.”
The vast majority of the protests across New York City on Monday were peaceful. But throughout the late evening, an enormous deployment of 8,000 officers — nearly a quarter of the department — was unable to contain the bands of looters or to stop them from smashing windows and breaking into stores that ranged from mom-and-pop shops to retail giants like Macy’s and Bergdorf Goodman.
Over again and again, the police responded to emergency calls, but even though they made more than 700 arrests, they struggled to secure the streets and get ahead of the vandals. One video showed a roiling crowd gathered in front of Macy’s, on 34th Street, with enough time to rip through a plywood barricade and swarm into the store before the police responded.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Tuesday the police had failed, but resisted calls to replace them with the National Guard. “The N.Y.P.D. and the mayor did not do their job last night,” Mr. Cuomo said. “Look at the videos. It was a disgrace.”
President Trump, who has repeatedly clashed with governors and mayors over his response to George Floyd’s death, urged Governor Cuomo to send in National Guardsmen. “NYC was ripped to pieces,” the president said on Twitter.
There has been violence and looting in several cities across the country for a week, triggered by the death of Mr. Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis last Monday. One officer, Derek Chauvin, who is white, has been charged with murder in the case.
Like other municipal officials, Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Shea have said that the police in New York have done their best to grapple with a complicated and quickly changing crisis, trying to balance respect for peaceful protest with protecting lives and property — all in the middle of a pandemic.
“The complexities our officers deal with are unimaginable,” Mr. de Blasio said.
But Ritchie Torres, a Bronx city councilman, said the police were slow to respond not only to the disturbances in Manhattan, but also to numerous reports of looting and arson on Fordham Road, the largest commercial district in his own borough.
“The administration assured me the situation was under control, but when I saw it for myself, it was anything but,” Mr. Torres said in an interview on Tuesday. “The city was largely reactive — almost blindsided. Then, when the police did respond, their presence was insufficient to get a grip on the situation.”
Mr. Cuomo said he would not deploy the National Guard, but he echoed Mr. Torres and others who were baffled that one of the largest and most sophisticated police departments in the world had been outmanned or outfoxed by looters.
From dusk on Monday until well after dark, reporters and ordinary residents posting on social media observed repeated incidents of the police either rushing past stores being looted or arriving at them too late to quell the mayhem.
The situation was apparently the same at the North Face store on Fifth Avenue and an Urban Outfitters branch in Herald Square. Small bands of young people, largely dressed in black, smashed through windows, making off with armloads of merchandise. Sometimes, officers were in the area and failed to promptly respond. At other times, they were nowhere to be seen.
Asked about these incidents on Tuesday, Mayor de Blasio pushed back firmly, saying he had seen “many, many police officers taking action to stop things.”
“We do not allow looting, period,” he said. “Anyone who is looting is a criminal.”
But the mayor acknowledged that police officials sent the bulk of their officers on Monday to SoHo, where most of the disturbances were on Sunday, failing to anticipate the troubles further north in Midtown. He also said some officers who may have sped by crimes in progress were most likely hurrying to answer other calls.
Joining him at a news conference, Mr. Shea noted that officers in New York are trained to preserve life over property and that, at least so far, there had been no casualties during the past chaotic week.
“We’ve had a very difficult, by anyone’s definition, five days of literally straight protest in the middle of the pandemic, dealing with everything, including the kitchen sink,” he said. “It has not been perfect by any stretch of the imagination.”
Some among his rank and file agreed. One officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk with reporters, called his colleagues’ tactics “a disaster,” comparing the city on Monday night to “a war zone.”
The senior police official who spoke anonymously said Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Shea were overly optimistic about the demonstrations and had failed to foresee that the largely peaceful protests could quickly devolve into vandalism, looting and violence. The official also noted the police communications systems became overburdened as commanders pleaded for backup at the same time.
“I think they were stretched thin,” he said. “I think the volume was even greater than the night before.”
Chief Terence Monahan, the highest-ranking uniformed officer, told The New York Post on Tuesday that he was outraged by Governor Cuomo’s criticism and defended the department’s handling of the unrest.
“I’m watching my men and women out there dealing with stuff that no cop should ever have to deal with — bricks, bottles, rocks,” Chief Monahan said.
In the evening, a spokesman for the governor walked back parts of Mr. Cuomo’s remarks about the police, saying he respected the rank and file but questioned Mr. de Blasio’s management and deployment of the 36,000 officers. “Why isn’t at least half of the force on the streets protecting public safety with looting going on across the city?” the aide, Richard Azzopardi, said.
Some decisions departed from past practice, experts on crowd control said. The city did not deploy plainclothes anti-crime officers during the Manhattan demonstrations to spot people throwing bricks or committing other crimes, a city official said. Mounted units were not used for crowd control either, and the demonstrators were allowed to roam relatively freely rather than being channeled onto certain routes.
Some officers blamed the ensuing chaos on indecisive leadership. “It seems like we have lost control,” said one city detective, also speaking on the condition of anonymity. “It’s apparent that there’s no direction.”
Another detective, who, like his colleagues, spoke on the condition that he not be named, said he did not believe that orders had been issued for officers to refrain from confronting looters. But he said officers had been instructed to “keep yourself safe,” and may have waited in some cases to engage with looters.
“It’s dangerous, especially if you don’t have a lot of police in the immediate area,” he said.
Brian Higgins, an expert on crowd control who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the police department should not be playing catch-up with looters a week into the demonstrations.
Many looters, he noted, seemed to have gone in and out of marquee stores with a giddy disregard for the consequences. The police, Mr. Higgins said, were either nowhere to be seen or appeared to have been ordered to stand down.
“Last night the N.Y.P.D. took it on the chin,” he said.
Michael Wilson and Ashley Southall contributed reporting.
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