as in a bunch of unpoliced undisciplined punks break some windows in the ghetto and it turns into " a major riot breaks out"
There are videos on Twitter with looters and videos with gunfire attributed to "Arab" store owners.
NSFW
https://twitter.com/rawsalerts/status/1607200219623481347
It sounds like criminals with handguns fired on owners who caught them and the owners responded with long arms.
This did happen but it's isolated to a particular neighborhood in Buffalo.
That doesn't excuse it but portraying the entire city as collapsing into chaos is inaccurate.
You’ve never been to Chicago, have you? Try living here. You’d see how little exaggeration that requires, because when one small group starts looting, more small groups get into it, and then it turns into LA ca. 1992 all over again.
Okay, that was a slight exaggeration, but things escalate very quickly.
“or the story could be grossly exaggerated”
Most likely it’s clickbait.
A city is paralyzed by a blizzard that includes 8 to 12-foot drifts. Temperatures are around zero with -40 windchills. Nobody can travel. Yet somehow looters are able to transverse all these obstacles and loot stores. That leads me to only one conclusion. The looters are Canadian Eskimos traveling in dogsleds or humping it wearing whalebone snowshoes.
Nope, it’s widespread looting. There are plenty of videos of it on Reddit.