Apple staff at the Apple store in tech Mecca Palo Alto should be investigated after they held back customers who tried stopping thieves who ransacked the store. They probably have a hand in the ransack.
The Daily Mail got more;
This is the incredible moment employees at an Apple store in the heart of California’s iconic Silicon Valley allow a pair of thieves to brazenly ransack the store, and even tell employees not to interfere.
The startling footage was filmed at the Apple store in Palo Alto on Black Friday and showed the masked thieves storming about the store and ripping iPhones, iPads, and laptops from their displays.
As the ransacking played out startled customers asked employees if they should do anything to stop it, but the employees told them not to intervene, and even guided some customers out of the way.
The thieves made off with about $35,000 worth of merchandise, according to the New York Post.
Though the thieves appeared to be unarmed, at some point during the raid one of them allegedly threatened a customer with violence, which elevated their crime from burglary shoplifting to robbery.
Two thieves could be seen in the video lurching around the Apple store, haphazardly tearing devices from the display tables, ripping them loose from their security cables, and stuffing them into bags.
At one point as a thief hauled on a phone, it came loose from his hands and it flew across the room to crash on the floor, but he carried on unfazed.
The thieves weaved through customers, even shoving some out of the way, as Apple employees in red polos stood by, and even guided customers out of the criminals’ way.
‘Yo, should we stop ’em, or what?’ one customer asked as a thief stuffed phones into his bags mere feet away.
‘Let him go!’ an Apple employee responded, throwing his hands up in the air as the thief scurried by.
At other points in the video employees could be heard telling customers ‘You gotta back up.’
The crooks took off in a red Mazda hatchback, according the the Post, and fled north on U.S. Highway 101.
No arrests have been made, but cops said they believe the suspects to be in their teens or early twenties.
The same store was robbed twice in a single 24-hour period in 2018, with thieves grabbing more than $100,000 in goods, according to the Post.
And in 2016, criminals drove a car through the front window of the store and took off with thousands of dollars in products.
Similar heists have skyrocketed in California since the pandemic started, according to Monterey Police Lt. Jake Pinkas.
Pinkas told Monterey County Now that authorities began identifying the crimes as a recurring issue in about the fall of 2021.
‘You started to see the more brazen [robberies], where they’re bringing tools in to take phones or laptops or break through glass,’ Pinkas said. ‘That definitely seems to have started after the pandemic year 2020, and went further into 2021.’
He said as recently as October, another Apple store was brazenly robbed of about $40,000 in merchandise.
Flip to the next page to watch the video and also pictures of the robbery…
