Riot

• 1. Introduction

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  A riot is a form of civil disorder in which people commit public violence against authority figures, against government, or against property. The targets shift with the moment. Shops, cars, restaurants, state-owned institutions, religious buildings. Each becomes a symbol of something the crowd wants to strike. Yet government offices themselves are rarely the target, because they tend to be too well protected.

  The word carries an old idea of chaos, of a herd losing its mind. But the evidence tells a stranger story. What looks like senseless tumult may follow rules of its own. So how does a disorganized gathering of people decide what to burn and what to spare? Why do food prices and football scores and questions of faith all ignite the same fire? And what makes one person decide it is safe to step into the crowd?

• 2. Why Crowds Erupt

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  Poverty, unemployment, poor living conditions, and the weight of taxation or conscription have all driven people into the streets. Riots tend to rise out of grievance or dissent, often when the legal channels for airing a complaint feel blocked. Conflicts between ethnic groups or religions add their own fuel, as do the outcomes of a sporting event.

  A riot is usually conducted not by an organized force but by a disorganized gathering of people. Individuals may try to lead or control it, but the action belongs to the crowd. Mob actions have long been described as chaotic and prone to herd behavior.

  That description may be wrong. A body of evidence suggests riots do not run on irrational herd-like behavior, the thing sometimes called mob mentality. Instead they follow inverted social norms. The crowd is not mindless. It is operating by a different rulebook, and that distinction reshapes how a riot can be understood.

• 3. The Many Faces

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  Food shortages turn hunger into action. When harvests fail, when food is hoarded or poisoned, when pests like locusts strike, desperate people may attack shops, farms, homes, or government buildings to loot staples like bread, grain, or salt. The historian T. S. Ashton, studying eighteenth century food riots among colliers, wrote that their turbulence was to be accounted for by something more elementary than politics. He called it the instinctive reaction of virility to hunger. Charles Wilson noted that spasmodic rises in food prices provoked keelmen on the Tyne to riot in 1709, and tin miners to plunder granaries at Falmouth in 1727. In the 1977 Egyptian Bread Riots, hundreds of thousands rioted after food subsidies stopped and prices rose.

  A police riot names something else entirely. The term describes the disproportionate and unlawful use of force by a group of police against civilians, including attacks that provoke civilians into violence. A political riot grows out of political purpose or political protest. A prison riot is a large-scale, temporary act of concerted defiance by prisoners against administrators, officers, or other prisoners, often to force change or attempt escape.

  Race or ethnicity becomes the key factor in a race riot, a term that entered the English language in the United States by the 1890s. Early use referred to mob action by members of a majority racial group against people of other perceived races. Religion drives a religious riot, where mobs have argued over who holds the primate of orthodoxy and have targeted people and property of a specific faith. Sports supply the spark for events like the Nika riots, set off by a team or athlete losing or winning. Sports are the most common cause of riots in the United States, accompanying more than half of all championship games or series. Almost all of them occur in the winning team's city.

• 4. Counting The Damage

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  During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, 2,383 people were injured and more than 12,000 were arrested. Sixty-three people were killed and over 700 businesses burned, with property damage estimated at over one billion dollars. At least ten of those killed were shot by police or National Guard forces.

  The 2005 riots in France lasted over three weeks and spread to nearly 300 towns. By the end, over 10,000 vehicles were destroyed and over 300 buildings burned. More than 2,800 suspected rioters were arrested, and 126 police and firefighters were injured. Estimated damages ran to over 200 million euros. Property destruction and harm to individuals are often immediately measurable, but the economic and political effects can be as complex as a riot's origins.

• 5. Holding The Line

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  Tear gas and CS gas are among the first tools police reach for when facing a crowd. Riot police also use less-than-lethal methods, such as shotguns that fire flexible baton rounds or rubber bullets meant to injure or incapacitate, breaking up the disorder or making arrests easier. The wider toolkit includes attack dogs, water cannons, plastic bullets, pepper spray, and snatch squads.

  Many forces keep dedicated divisions for public order work. London has the Territorial Support Group and the Special Patrol Group. France fields the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, the Netherlands the Mobiele Eenheid, and Germany its arrest units. These weapons are officially designated as non-lethal, yet people have died or been injured from their use. In Northern Ireland, rubber bullets caused seventeen deaths over the thirty five years between 1970 and 2005.

  The policing of riots has also been marred by accusations that police themselves provoked the violence. There is a quieter lever that works better than force. A high risk of arrest deters rioting more effectively than severe punishment. As more people join, the risk of being caught falls, which persuades still more to join.

• 6. The Law's Definition

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  Twelve is the number that matters in England and Wales. Riot is a statutory offence created by section 1(1) of the Public Order Act 1986, which requires 12 or more persons present together using or threatening unlawful violence for a common purpose, in a way that would make a person of reasonable firmness fear for their safety. A single person can be liable for riot if it is shown that at least twelve were present using or threatening such violence. Riot is an indictable-only offence, and a person convicted is liable to imprisonment for any term not exceeding ten years, or a fine, or both.

  Once, the Riot Act had to be read aloud by an official, with the wording exactly correct, before violent policing could begin. If the group did not disperse after the reading, lethal force could legally be used. The common law offence of riot was abolished for England and Wales on the 1st of April 1987. The Riot Act 1414 was an act of the Parliament of England, repealed in stages until the Criminal Law Act 1967 came into force on the 1st of January 1968.

  Other jurisdictions draw their own lines. In India, rioting is an offense under the Indian Penal Code. In 1988 the Israeli army defined a violent riot as a disturbance with three or more persons, including stone throwing, erecting a barrier, or burning a tire. Scotland keeps an offence known as mobbing, or mobbing and rioting. Under United States federal law, a riot involves an assemblage of three or more persons whose acts or threats of violence pose a clear and present danger of damage or injury. In New York, the term is not defined explicitly, but a person is guilty of inciting to riot when they urge ten or more persons to engage in tumultuous and violent conduct likely to create public alarm.