Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

Hungry Harvey Victims Have Committed No Crime

Peacefully taking what you need from a supermarket isn't the same as looting.

August 30, 2017 at 3:57 PM UTC

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

This store looks impassable.
Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg

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Twitter erupted with fury Tuesday after a television reporter tweeted from Houston that he had informed police about looting he observed at a grocery store while covering Hurricane Harvey. Angry tweets accused the reporter, Tom Llamas of ABC News, of “ratting out” desperate, starving people. Llamas later said that he had been misunderstood.

Were the reporter’s critics right? Should we conclude that people taking food from an empty store during an emergency are not committing a crime? That’s exactly what we should conclude -- they are not lawbreakers -- but it’s important that we understand exactly why.