A lot of what is being described as "looting" sounds much more like it should be called "salvaging". In a flooded city like New Orleans this week the stuff in shops - electrical goods and clothes and food and that, had in effect been destroyed, so far as the legal owners are concerned. The only way anyone could get any use out of them would be by wading in there and then and taking them away. Clearly the owners of chainstores and supermarkets weren't going to be doing that themselves. Treating that kind of thing as "looting" is bizarre and wrongheaded.

"Looting" is taking things that continue to have value to their owners or to the community - the stuff in people's homes above the water level, artworks in museums. Money in bank vaults even.

Wasting effort on trying to stop people clearing the stores of stuff that was going to waste (setting aside a special case like looting from gun stores, where the stuff taken was itself a threat to public safety) just doesn't make sense, even if such efforts were not also a distraction from the important things that needed to be done, especially rescuing people, and looking after them.

I think much of what we have been given about "looting" and I suspect a lot more has a strong lement of spin, an effort to divert attenmtion from other things, and to make it easier for people to distance themselves from human tragedy by implying that somehow this community was different and dysfunctional and the architect of its own problems. There appears to be evidence that a lot of selective rumnour amplification has been going on, and that some of the rumours directly interfered with rescue efforts.
..................
And I agree with Joe and others about Kirsten Anderberg missing the way this place works, and being overhasty in her judgements. And I say that on the basis of agreeing with much of what she has actually written. But I'd much sooner see a discussion contnuing about the actual issues rather than about that side of it.