A mall outside Louisville, Kentucky was forced to shut down on Saturday night as hundreds of black teens went on a rampage, running through the Mall St. Matthews until being forced out by police. At 8:00 pm on the day after Christmas–one of the busiest days of the year at malls across America–management decided to shut the mall down after the “wilding” incident began.
There were no arrest and no injuries. At 7:00 p.m., six officers assigned to the mall as part of holiday coverage alerted dispatchers a disturbance. Almost immediately, several other incidents were reported and a number of police cars rushed to the scene. Police suspect that the incident was organized on social media, according to the Associated Press.
As WDRB reported, the number of people actually involved in the mall melee seems to be 500 or more :
“There were as many as 2,000 kids at the mall — many of them unsupervised,” said Officer Dennis McDonald, the public information officer for the St. Matthews Police Department. “A good amount of them were there for legitimate reasons — to shop, eat or go to the movies. But a large number were there to do nothing other than loiter, harass other shoppers and be confrontational with police officers.”
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“The calls started to pile up and we couldn’t respond in a timely matter,” McDonald said.
Around that time, dispatchers began to receive calls from area businesses located near the mall.
At the Toys ‘R’ Us at 4900 Shelbyville Road, a dispatcher is heard sending an officer to the store in response to “a subject throwing bricks at the back of the back of the building, outside. Manager advises he can hear them throwing the items and shouting.”
One of the six St. Matthews Police Officers assigned to the mall on the holiday detail began relaying details of what was taking place inside.
“We’ve got multiple crowds of hundreds, we’ve got stores going into lock down, shutting their gates,” he told dispatchers. “We are responding to another fight right now by the Victoria’s Secret entrance. They are going on all around us.”
Local Kentucky TV station WLKY reported on the chaos and video of the mall thugs shows they almost all black teens from “local middle or high schools. ”
The story has received a great deal of national exposure, but the mainstream media coverage has consistently left out the race of the “youth” that went wilding through the mall, as well as consistently using the number 2,000 as the number of people involved in the incident. The reporting is part of the pattern of misreporting on stories about large groups of black youths goings on rampages nationwide in the past few years.
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