Mob Violence

An interesting article from ABC News from last year on the causes and psychology of mob violence:

Mob violence, including looting, typically ignites with little planning. Many who join are young people attracted to excitement and the lure of defying authority. Typically, a small percentage of hardened criminal characters are found in mobs; they do have an important role in instigating the unbridled lawlessness and setting the vicious tone of its chaos. Alcohol is an important lubricant to fire-setting and other destructiveness for the sake of destroying.

People do not loot alone; mob violence and mayhem in groups diminish a sense in actors that they are accountable for robbery. Each looks around and sees the person next to him throwing a brick or Molotov cocktail, stealing and with no resistance from authority. And the atmosphere and mentality spread among those who are stimulation and thrill seeking, like flames.

Looting and violence typically perpetuate and even are copied elsewhere when the media and public authority explain away the behavior as "anger" and "disenchantment" by "disaffected youth." Such messages carry with them an entitlement that legitimizes lawlessness.

It also discusses myths of mob violence:

That mob violence and looting equate with protest and are motivated by a quest for social change. Prosocial individuals willing to risk their safety by assembly and protest are evolved enough to know that they gain nothing for their causes by robbing from small businesses that serve their communities. So they don't do it, even when they are angriest. The figure standing in front of a tank at Tiananmen Square risked his own self with the military. He and his compatriots did not loot local businesses and attack others indiscriminately.

Rioters who rampaged in genteel Vancouver this year erupted after the Stanley Cup was lost; and in Detroit in 1984 after the World Series was won. Rioters at G-8 summits are essentially anarchists, advocates of chaos rather than social change. They exploit the likelihood that if they cause a disturbance, a feckless reporter will go searching for their grievance and give justification to others to join their "venting." It really is the case that some young people find excitement in creating mayhem, and instigators use a pretext to set things off.

The author suggests that the way to reduce mob violence is to shame the perpetrators by focusing on their victims--essentially, make it socially unacceptable to engage in rioting. Problem is, that really doesn't help the immediate victim.

There is a clue above, however, on how to deal with a mob. If the mob is acting out of a sense of anonymity and low risk of personal responsibility, then these are the two areas to exploit. Unless you personally know and can communicate the identity of members of a mob, there is probably little that the common citizen can do as to anonymity. However, the risk of personal responsibility can be increased to a level unacceptable to the rioter by increasing his/her perceived risk of physical harm--like the Korean shop owners' public display of firearms in the LA riots following the Rodney King incident, or the impromptu Sikh militia formed to protect their neighborhoods during last year's London riots.

While thinking about this subject, you may remember the now largely ignored incidents of black mob violence (i.e., "flash mobs") from last year. (See another example here). This site doesn't appear to have been updated for a while, but it lists reported incidents of flash mobs.