Looting

Recently I watched a video on Instagram, that showed people looting a container on a freight train in Chicago in broad daylight. The items they were stealing looked like TV-screens, etc. -  definitely not food items. What bothers me when I am confronted with stories about looting like this one is the number of people involved in these crimes. Usually when one reads a crime story in the news, it is just one or two individuals involved in the crime. As bad as it might be, it still gives one the feeling that only a small percentage of people in society are committing crimes; and that society in general is able to deal with the problem of crime through police, courts and prisons.

But reading or watching scenes of looting seems to turn this around: One is left with the feeling that the majority of society is involved in crime and that only a few are still law abiding. It's like one would meet the same people who were involved in looting the next day in schools, at the grocery store, in the metro or other public places and everything appears to be normal. In fact, it is not normal. No society can function for long when looting is getting out of hand. 

Coming back to this Instagram video I still don't know what was more disturbing for me: Watching the brazen looting or reading the comments attached to it that tried to justify the looting.