How do riots happen

El Cajon police warn public about suspect in violent, unprovoked stabbing. San Diego Unified redistricting group will meet for first time Friday. Activist for deported veterans allowed back to U. Pursuit from Jamul to Chula Vista ends with arrest inside church during funeral service. Demonstrations, protests and occasional violent revolutions are as old as society, and some have had peaceful and successful conclusions leading to reform.

From to , nonviolent protests worldwide led to 50 peaceful transitions from authoritarianism to democracy. Demonstrations and protests can relieve pressure, allowing people to make their voices heard and allowing them to share pain and to persuade authorities that things need to change. Riots are different.

While they can often lead to positive change, they can also cause serious damage to property, human life and trust in the body politic. Revolutions often occur when riots expose the contradictions of society and lay bare the inability of the government to control order and economic functioning.

Given that peaceful demonstrations can be highly effective, why do they sometimes break down into violence and looting? As is true of illness, economic catastrophes and wars, riots are often the result of a confluence of dynamics. No one factor causes them. The image is iconic for African Americans who see it as representative of their relationship with the police. That image, upsetting and enraging to almost all of us, comes on top of numerous other images of unarmed blacks being unnecessarily killed.

A recent YouTube video showed a white woman calling the police and feigning that she was in danger from a black man who had asked her to obey the law and put her dog on a leash. Blacks know that had this not been caught on camera, he likely would have been arrested.

The s unrest, for example, led to the Kerner Commission , which reviewed the cause of the uprisings and pushed reforms in local police departments. The changes to police ended up taking various forms: more active hiring of minority police officers, civilian review boards of cases in which police use force, and residency requirements that force officers to live in the communities they police.

People would say that this kind of level of upheaval in the streets and this kind of chaos in the streets is counterproductive," Thompson said.

Sugrue agreed. Similarly, in Los Angeles, the riots led the Los Angeles Police Department to implement reforms that put more emphasis on community policing and diversity. The reforms appear to have worked, to some extent: Surveys from the Los Angeles Times found approval of the LAPD rose from 40 percent in to 77 percent in — although approval among Hispanic and black residents was lower, at 76 percent and 68 percent respectively.

It's hard to say, but these types of changes might have prevented more riots over policing issues in Los Angeles. In the immediate aftermath, riots can scare away investment and business from riot-torn communities. This is something that remains an issue in West Baltimore, where some buildings are still scarred by the riots. In the long term, they can also motivate draconian policy changes that emphasize law and order above all else.

The "tough on crime" policies enacted in the s through s are mostly attributed to urban decay brought on by suburbanization, a general rise in crime, and increasing drug use, but Thompson and Sugrue argued that the backlash to the s riots was also partly to blame. The "tough on crime" policies pushed a considerably harsher approach in the criminal justice system, with a goal of deterring crime with the threat of punishment. Police were evaluated far more on how many arrests they carried out, even for petty crimes like loitering.

Sentences for many crimes dramatically increased. As a result, levels of incarceration skyrocketed in the US, with black men at far greater risk of being jailed or imprisoned than other segments of the population. The irony is that many of these "tough on crime" policies led to the current distrust of police in cities like Baltimore, as David Simon, creator of The Wire and former Baltimore crime reporter, explained to the Bill Keller at the Marshall Project :.

And they say, man, this guy had 80 arrests last month, and this other guy's only got one. Who do you think gets made sergeant? And then who trains the next generation of cops in how not to do police work? I've just described for you the culture of the Baltimore police department amid the deluge of the drug war, where actual investigation goes unrewarded and where rounding up bodies for street dealing, drug possession, loitering such — the easiest and most self-evident arrests a cop can make — is nonetheless the path to enlightenment and promotion and some additional pay.

So by viewing riots as criminal acts instead of legitimate political displays of anger at systemic failures, the politicians of the s, '80s, and '90s pushed some policies that actually fostered further anger toward police — even as other, positive reforms were simultaneously spurred by urban uprisings. By misunderstanding the purpose of the riots, public officials made events like them more likely. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.

Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today to help us keep our work free for all. Public order experts say that for the police, being seen as legitimate and able to engage protesters in dialogue is key.

Dr Ho also believes that negotiation is the best way - but points out that "one of the hardest things today is that a lot of protests are leaderless. If you can't find the leader, you can't negotiate with them. More generally, he adds, politicians can make matters better - or worse - based on their approach to dialogue, and whether they use emergency legislation. Ultimately, however, riots can be a symptom of deep-seated tensions and complicated issues that don't have an easy solution.

You could argue even the police killings are symptoms - the underlying cause is white supremacy, racism, and things the US has not fundamentally dealt with. In pictures: Protest clashes in Minneapolis. The last 30 minutes of George Floyd's life.

This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Protesters took to the streets again on Saturday night. Protests spread when there's a shared identity. Image source, AFP.

England riots: Maps and timeline How one night in the riots changed my life. How the police respond matters. Image source, EPA. In the film, the stage seems well set for a riot. But is the crowd protesting this — or acting as a mindless mob? As commentator Aditya Vats has pointed out , the film appears to reflect the views of the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes , who argued that society has a drive towards chaos and destruction. In the film, Fleck is portrayed as the individual who unleashes these apparently innate tendencies when he brutally kills first three wealthy young bankers — and then a TV talk show host live on air.

Subsequently, thousands of rioters in clown masks are shown rioting, looting and killing, seemingly inspired by his actions. This is a simple, and popular, representation of real-world crowd violence. This lack of explanatory power has meant that contemporary social psychology has long rejected these classical explanations as inadequate and even potentially dangerous — not least because they fail to take account of the factors that actually drive such confrontations.

In fact, when people riot, their collective behaviour is never mindless.