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Civil disorder, also known as civil disturbance, civil unrest, civil strife, or turmoil, are situations when law enforcement struggle to maintain public order or tranquility. [1] [2]
Any number of things may cause civil disorder, whether it is a single cause or a combination of causes; however, most are born from political grievances, economic disparities, social discord, but historically have been the result of long-standing oppression by a group of people towards another.
Civil disorder arising from political grievances can include a range of events, from a simple protest to a mass civil disobedience. These events can be spontaneous, but can also be planned. These events can turn violent when agitators and law enforcers overreact.
Civil disorder has in history arisen from economic disputes, political reasons (such as in opposition to oppressive or tyrannical government forces), religious opposition, racial oppression and social discord among various cases throughout history.
Exploiting a crowd's mood, radicals can manipulate and weaponize a crowd, using skillful agitation to coax the crowd's capacity for violence and turn it into a vengeful mob, directing the crowd's aggression and resentment at the agitator's chosen target. [1]
Tactical agitators can leverage media, including social media, to connect with potential crowd members and incite them to break the law or provoke others, all without direct personal contact. Conversely, a skilled leader can calm or divert a crowd using strategic suggestions, commands, or appeals to reason, aiming to de-escalate a situation. [1]
Emotional contagion plays a significant role in crowd behaviour by fostering a sense of unity among its members. This unity can lead the crowd to adopt a mob mentality and engage in mob behaviour. Crowd members amplify each other's emotions, creating a heightened state of collective emotion. Ideas rapidly spread among the group and to bystanders and mass media. [1]
When emotional contagion prevails, raw emotion is high while self-discipline is low. Personal prejudices and unsatisfied desires – usually restrained – are unabashedly released. [1] This incentivizes crowd membership, as the crowd provides cover for individuals to do things they want to do, but would not dare try to do alone. This incentive can become greater for the crowd than its concern for law and authority, leading to unlawful and disruptive acts. Once the crowd engages in such acts, it effectively becomes a mob – a highly emotional, unreasonable, potentially violent crowd. [1]
Crowd behavior is the emotional needs, fears, and prejudices of the crowd members. [1] It is driven by social factors such as the strength, or weakness, of leadership, moral perspective, or community uniformity, and also by psychological factors of suggestion e.g. imitation, anonymity, impersonality, emotional release, emotional contagion, panic, etc. [1]
During civil disorder, any crowd can be a threat to law enforcers because it is open to manipulation. This is because the behavior of a crowd is under the direction of the majority of its members. While its members are usually inclined to obey the law, emotional stimuli, and the feeling of fearlessness that arises from being in a crowd, can cause crowd members to indulge in impulses, act on aggressions, and unleash rage. When law enforcement limits the full realization of these actions, the crowd will channel this hostility elsewhere, making the crowd a hostile and unpredictable threat to law enforcers. [1]
Crowds want to be directed, and can become frustrated by confusion and uncertainty; therefore, leadership can have a profound influence on the intensity and conduct of a crowd's behavior. [1] The first person to authoritatively direct a crowd will likely be followed. Opportunity for radicals to take charge of a group to emerge when no authoritative voice emerges, and the crowd becomes frustrated without direction.
Panic, which is extremely and quickly contagious, also affects crowd behavior by influencing their ability to reason, lending to frantic, irrational behavior that can not only endanger the crowd, but also others. [1] During civil disorder, panic can set in when a crowd member realizes –
A goal of violent demonstrators is to spur law enforcers to take action that can be exploited as acts of brutality in order to generate sympathy for their cause, and/or to anger and demoralize the opposition. [1] Crowds can use a range of tactics to evade law enforcement or to promote disorder, from verbal assault to distracting law enforcers to building barricades. The more well-planned tactics occur, the more purposeful the disorder. For example, crowds may form human blockades to shut down roads, they may trespass on government property, they may try to force mass arrests, they may handcuff themselves to things or to each other, or they may lock arms, making it more difficult to separate them, or they might create confusion or diversions through the use of rock throwing, arson, or terrorist acts, giving leeway to law enforcers to be forceful or excessive while trying to remove them. [1] Also, sometimes, terrorist elements are involved. [1]
Most participants of civil disorder engage on foot. However, organized efforts can often implore the use vehicles and wireless communication. [1]
Participants have been known to use scanners to monitor police frequencies or transmitters to sabotage law enforcement communications. [1]
If a crowd turns violent, effectively becoming a "mob," it may execute physical attacks on people and property, such as by throwing homemade weapons like Molotov cocktails, firing small arms, and planting improvised explosive devices. [1] A crowd may resort to throwing rocks, bricks, bottles, etc. If violence is pre-arranged, the crowd can hide their weapons or vandalism tools well before the crowd formation, catching law enforcement by surprise. [1]
Crowds may arm themselves with:
A mob may erect barricades to impede, or prevent, the effectiveness of law enforcement. For example, they may use grappling hooks, chains, rope, or vehicles to breach gates or fences. [1] They may use sticks or poles to limit law enforcement's use of billy clubs and bayonets. [1] They may overturn civilian vehicles to impede troops advancing to engage them or vandalize law enforcement vehicles to try to spark over-reaction from law enforcement or to incite further lawlessness from the mob. [1]
Mobs often employ fire, smoke, or hidden explosive devices e.g. strapped to animals, masked in cigarette lighters or toys, rigged to directed vehicles, etc. [1] Not only can these devices be used to create confusion or diversion, but they can also be used to destroy property, mask looting of mob participants, or provide cover for mob participants firing weapons at law enforcement. [1] If law enforcement engages with the mob, in returning fire, any innocent casualties resulting from the chaos usually make law enforcement look undisciplined and oppressive. [1]
According to the U.S. Code, a person is engaged in civil disorder if he or she -
(1)"...teaches or demonstrates to any other person the use, application, or making of any firearm or explosive or incendiary device, or technique capable of causing injury or death to persons, knowing or having reason to know or intending that the same will be unlawfully employed for use in, or in furtherance of, a civil disorder which may in any way or degree obstruct, delay, or adversely affect commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in commerce or the conduct or performance of any federally protected function; or...
(2)...transports or manufactures for transportation in commerce any firearm, or explosive or incendiary device, knowing or having reason to know or intending that the same will be used unlawfully in furtherance of a civil disorder; or...
(3)...commits or attempts to commit any act to obstruct, impede, or interfere with any fireman or law enforcement officer lawfully engaged in the lawful performance of his official duties incident to and during the commission of a civil disorder which in any way or degree obstructs, delays, or adversely affects commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in commerce or the conduct or performance of any federally protected function." [3]
Like mob participants, law enforcers are also susceptible to crowd behavior. Such tense confrontation can emotionally stimulate them, creating a highly emotional atmosphere all around. [1] This emotional stimulation can become infectious throughout law enforcement agents, conflicting with their disciplined training.
When emotional tension is high among law enforcement agents, they may breach their feeling of restraint and commit acts, against people in the mob, that they normally would suppress. [1] The emotional atmosphere can also make them highly susceptible to rumors and fear. [1]
Like mob members, law enforcement agents, acting as a group, can also lose their sense of individuality and develop a feeling of anonymity. [1] Under emotional instability, individual prejudices, that any individual law enforcement agent may harbor against the mob, or against individual participants of the mob, may influence the behavior of the law enforcement agent. [1] Like the mob, these conditions make law enforcement actors more likely to imitate the behavior of each other, which can result in a chain of biased, excessive, or otherwise, dangerous, behavior in which law enforcement agents act upon mob agents as impersonal threats and not as human beings. [1] Such action is heightened in which law enforcement agents are monolithic, across race and ethnicity, as law enforcement will become more susceptible to framing the disorder as a confrontation between "them" and "us." [1]
Actions by law enforcement agents, motivated by emotion and prejudice, is often used as evidence against their ill will toward a crowd, or a mob, with their behavior only further inflaming confrontation rather than reducing it. [1]
Under such situations, law enforcement agents are rarely held accountable for all their actions against a crowd. [1] [4]
In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority. The term crime does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition, though statutory definitions have been provided for certain purposes. The most popular view is that crime is a category created by law; in other words, something is a crime if declared as such by the relevant and applicable law. One proposed definition is that a crime or offence is an act harmful not only to some individual but also to a community, society, or the state. Such acts are forbidden and punishable by law.
A riot or mob violence is a form of civil disorder commonly characterized by a group lashing out in a violent public disturbance against authority, property or people.
Non-lethal weapons, also called nonlethal weapons, less-lethal weapons, less-than-lethal weapons, non-deadly weapons, compliance weapons, or pain-inducing weapons are weapons intended to be less likely to kill a living target than conventional weapons such as knives and firearms with live ammunition. It is often understood that unintended or incidental casualties are risked wherever force is applied; however, non-lethal weapons minimise the risk of casualties as much as possible. Non-lethal weapons are used in policing and combat situations to limit the escalation of conflict where employment of lethal force is prohibited or undesirable, where rules of engagement require minimum casualties, or where policy restricts the use of conventional force. However, these weapons occasionally cause serious injuries or death due to allergic reactions, improper use and/or other factors; for this reason the term "less-lethal" has been preferred by some organizations as it describes the risks of death more accurately than the term "non-lethal", which some have argued is a misnomer.
A category of social psychology known as "crowd psychology" or "mob psychology" examines how the psychology of a group of people differs from the psychology of any one person within the group. The study of crowd psychology looks into the actions and thought processes of both the individual members of the crowd and of the crowd as a collective social entity. The behavior of a crowd is much influenced by deindividuation and by the person's impression of the universality of behavior, both of which conditions increase in magnitude with size of the crowd. Notable theorists in crowd psychology include Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Many of these theories are today tested or used to simulate crowd behaviors in normal or emergency situations. One of the main focuses in these simulation works aims to prevent crowd crushes and stampedes.
Mobbing, as a sociological term, refers either to bullying in any context, or specifically to that within the workplace, especially when perpetrated by a group rather than an individual.
Abuse is the act of improper usage or treatment of a person or thing, often to unfairly or improperly gain benefit. Abuse can come in many forms, such as: physical or verbal maltreatment, injury, assault, violation, rape, unjust practices, crimes, or other types of aggression. To these descriptions, one can also add the Kantian notion of the wrongness of using another human being as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves. Some sources describe abuse as "socially constructed", which means there may be more or less recognition of the suffering of a victim at different times and societies.
Riot control measures are used by law enforcement, military, paramilitary or security forces to control, disperse, and arrest people who are involved in a riot, unlawful demonstration or unlawful protest.
The expression collective behavior was first used by Franklin Henry Giddings and employed later by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, Herbert Blumer, Ralph H. Turner and Lewis Killian, and Neil Smelser to refer to social processes and events which do not reflect existing social structure, but which emerge in a "spontaneous" way. Use of the term has been expanded to include reference to cells, social animals like birds and fish, and insects including ants. Collective behavior takes many forms but generally violates societal norms. Collective behavior can be tremendously destructive, as with riots or mob violence, silly, as with fads, or anywhere in between. Collective behavior is always driven by group dynamics, encouraging people to engage in acts they might consider unthinkable under typical social circumstances.
A crowd is as a group of people that have gathered for a common purpose or intent. Examples are a demonstration, a sports event, or a looting. A crowd may also simply be made up of many people going about their business in a busy area.
The Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) is a department of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime that uses behavioral analysts to assist in criminal investigations. Their mission is to provide behavioral-based investigative and/or operational support by applying case experience, research, and training to complex and time-sensitive crimes, typically involving acts or threats of violence.
Deindividuation is a concept in social psychology that is generally thought of as the loss of self-awareness in groups, although this is a matter of contention. For the social psychologist, the level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social situation. As such, social psychologists emphasize the role of internal psychological processes. Other social scientists, such as sociologists, are more concerned with broad social, economic, political, and historical factors that influence events in a given society.
Some jurisdictions may commit certain types of dangerous sex offenders to state-run detention facilities following the completion of their sentence if that person has a "mental abnormality" or personality disorder that makes the person likely to engage in sexual offenses if not confined in a secure facility. In the United States, twenty states, the federal government, and the District of Columbia have a version of these commitment laws, which are referred to as "Sexually Violent Predator" (SVP) or "Sexually Dangerous Persons" laws.
Collective mental state is generally a literary or legal term, mostly used in sociology and philosophy, to refer to the condition of someone's being-state when around others. An assessment of a collective mental state includes a description of thought processes, memory, emotions, mood, cognitive state, and energy levels, including the meta overlay of interactions between individuals.
Pythagoras is a multi-sided agent-based model (ABM) created to support the growth and refinement of the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory's's Project Albert. Anything with a behavior can be represented as an agent. The interaction of the agents and their behaviors can lead to unexpected or emerging group behaviors, which is the primary strength of this type of modeling approach. As Pythagoras has grown in capability, it has been applied to a wide variety of tactical, operational and campaign-level topics in conventional and irregular warfare.
Standoff distance is a security term that refers to measures to prevent unscreened and potentially threatening people and vehicles from approaching within a certain distance of a building, car, or other shelter, roadblock or other location, or to a person such as a law enforcement officer or VIP, or to a friendly area / location.
Behavioral contagion is a form of social contagion involving the spread of behavior through a group. It refers to the propensity for a person to copy a certain behavior of others who are either in the vicinity, or whom they have been exposed to. The term was originally used by Gustave Le Bon in his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind to explain undesirable aspects of behavior of people in crowds. In the digital age, behavioral contagion is also concerned with the spread of online behavior and information. A variety of behavioral contagion mechanisms were incorporated in models of collective human behavior.
In psychology, manipulation is defined as an action designed to influence or control another person, usually in an underhanded or unfair manner which facilitates one's personal aims. Methods someone may use to manipulate another person may include seduction, suggestion, coercion, and blackmail to induce submission. Manipulation is generally considered a dishonest form of social influence as it is used at the expense of others. Barring mental disabilities, humans are inherently capable of manipulative and deceptive behavior, with the main differences being of specific personality characteristics or disorders.
Social contagion involves behaviour, emotions, or conditions spreading spontaneously through a group or network. The phenomenon has been discussed by social scientists since the late 19th century, although much work on the subject was based on unclear or even contradictory conceptions of what social contagion is, so exact definitions vary. Some scholars include the unplanned spread of ideas through a population as social contagion, though others prefer to class that as memetics. Generally social contagion is understood to be separate from the collective behaviour which results from a direct attempt to exert social influence.
Crowd manipulation is the intentional or unwitting use of techniques based on the principles of crowd psychology to engage, control, or influence the desires of a crowd in order to direct its behavior toward a specific action. This practice is common to religion, politics and business and can facilitate the approval or disapproval or indifference to a person, policy, or product. The ethicality of crowd manipulation is commonly questioned.
Complex contagion is the phenomenon in social networks in which multiple sources of exposure to an innovation are required before an individual adopts the change of behavior. It differs from simple contagion in that unlike a disease, it may not be possible for the innovation to spread after only one incident of contact with an infected neighbor. The spread of complex contagion across a network of people may depend on many social and economic factors; for instance, how many of one's friends adopt the new idea as well as how many of them cannot influence the individual, as well as their own disposition in embracing change.
