On the Recent Looting

After several nights of rioting in the city you live in, you can be forgiven for thinking that law and order has completely broken down, and state collapse is imminent. The spread of the riots has ironically mirrored the coronavirus it replaced in the news - everyone looks on filled with horror and catharsis at the chaos in some other city, sure it won't happen to them...until it does. Now there are riots in Paris. Of course there are. 

It is jarring to most normal people’s sense of the world though. Both the left and the right agree that the police are powerful, and can mess you up. The right is mostly happy about this, and the left is mostly unhappy. But they both agree that the police are terrifying if you get on the wrong side of them.

But here we are, and the police suddenly seem powerless. The coin has both sides. On one side, the riot police are mostly maintaining their ground – keeping organized lines, being disciplined in the face of mobs yelling at them, not giving provocation but mostly not retreating, which would be psychologically much worse.

And yet, you wake up the next day, and all the stores are trashed. You listen to the police scanner and it’s a continuous stream of “cricket wireless store has been looted, please send a team to clean it up. 50 kids looting the Macy’s. The bookstore on 5th Avenue has been looted, please send a team to board it up.” And so on, and so on. And you realize pretty quickly that when it comes to property damage, they are being totally responsive, waiting for it to happen, and there is no serious attempt being made to stop the thugs from trashing your store. 

Actually, it’s worse than that. If you choose to defend with a gun your uninsured store that represents your life savings, and need to actually use it, there’s a 50/50 chance that you’re going to jail for a long time. They won’t be there to stop the looters from trashing your store, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be there to arrest you if you stop them yourself. 

I know some reactionary friends that have gotten extremely black-pilled over this in the last few days. The only solace is that many of the big corporate stores being trashed are the same ones that have been pushing woke capital so hard for the past decade. Well, what goes around comes around. But this is a pretty grim and ironic schadenfreude beverage with which to wash down the bitter pill that the police aren’t able to protect order, and the forces of disorder and chaos are entirely in the ascendency. 

But even in this grim spot, some contrary perspectives stand out. 

First, there have been many riots. Indeed, you’ve lived through them. And for the proper perspective, you need to consider ones that are quite emotionally far removed. For instance, the 2015 Ferguson riots, or the Baltimore riots, are probably things you might have had quite strong emotional responses to at the time, one way or another. So instead think about the 2010 London riots, where (be honest), you can’t even remember what they were all about – some guy got killed while being pursued by police, or something. At the time, you probably thought it was an indication of how pissweak the British cops were, and the complete powerlessness of the British state. Well, the joke's on us, apparently.  

But the more important question is … what were the long term consequences of those riots for London? Would you say, to a first approximation…nothing? You can’t even connect it to the only thing Yanks know about Britain, namely Brexit – London itself was firmly Remain. Same with the LA riots. We got some policing reforms in LA, I think. We got Roof Koreans memes. Did LA collapse? Did law and order in LA collapse, more than for a few days? Not that I’ve heard of. 

A simple way to clarify consequences is with real estate. If you bought in Detroit in 1968, yeah, you lost everything. Sometimes, it really is a disaster. But if you bought in Brixton in 1981, or LA in 1992 (maybe not in South Central itself), or London in 2010, you made out extremely well. Even Ferguson has more than recovered since 2015. Paris, I’m not so sure – probably too early to tell, and the protests there seem more chronic than acute. Better yet, what were the consequences for the riots around the WTO protests in Seattle in the late 90s? I bet you didn't even remember those. 

(An aside I can’t forbear including – I hate idiots glorifying riots, and I generally dislike contemporary free verse, but if you want to learn how to do a Jamaican accent, there is no better source than Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Di Great Insohreckshan”, written about the Brixton riots, which I somehow quite like)

Mostly, these things die down. Mostly, the mob has no actual important political consequences. Mostly, the good deal of ruin in a nation or a city lives to survive another day. 

And if you want to know why, I think you need to pay attention to the dog that didn’t bark here. Which is the following.

These are massive, widespread riots. Thousands and thousands in the streets, looting, burning, throwing projectiles at the cops. 

But where are the guns?

America is absolutely awash in cheap, reliable handguns. They are everywhere. We are told this constantly. You turn up expecting to get in a violent confrontation with armed men representing the state, who have some legal backing to literally kill you if you get violent. To this confrontation, you bring…a frozen water bottle? Fireworks? The conspiracy theory doing the rounds on twitter was that sinister forces were strategically leaving pallets of bricks near protest points for rioters to throw. Whatever you think of that rumor, it’s hard not to be reminded of Richard Nixon’s remarks about Operation Eagle Claw, to use eight helicopters filled with troops  to rescue the American hostages in Iran. “Eight? Why not a thousand? It’s not like we don’t have them!”. Why not leave a pallet filled with ARs instead? Hell, lots of these guys have their own guns already. Even if Soros is stingy with the funding, it doesn’t cost anything to tell all the rioters to bring their glocks along. 

Not only that, but the police themselves turn up comically under-armed relative to 99% of their violent confrontations. This was one of the most pointed critiques of police behavior recently. A large and recent libertarian criticism of police deparments has been their increasing militarization in the past two decades or so. Every rinky-dink small town police department now has to have a poorly trained SWAT team and a Bearcat. These things generally get used to implement no-knock raids on local coke dealers, which is bad enough as an overreaction. But still! The one time some actual military force actually might make a big difference to the outcome, and they turn up with sticks! 

There are various ways to read this, and they seem to lie on a continuum of what you think about human behavior in this context, ranging from fake and pisspoor, to calculating and frightening. I never know how much to weight each one. 

At one extreme is the thesis I associate most with Randall Collins book, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory. He basically says that, contrary to what most people think, the average person doesn’t like inflicting violence on others, isn’t good at it, and looks for reasons to avoid or end it. Violent confrontations are typically characterized by fear and tension on both sides. When violence does happen, it fits into a small number of categories – ganging up on the weak, “forward panics” (where a previously evenly matched confrontation suddenly gets resolved in one side’s favor – think a collapse of one army and a rout on a battlefield), ritualized violence like sports, and raucous violence like riots. 

In other words, most people at the riot aren't really trying to inflict violence on the police or civilians, because they're not really interested in that. His characterizes the psychology of looting as follows:

Looting and destroying property is a relatively mild form of violence that arises within moral holidays, when authority has broken down. … Mass participation in looting is a key device for making a riot last, indeed for building it up into a notable event, getting it political attention in the enemy camp or in the eyes of the wider public. The looters themselves generally lack a political ideology; politicized black civil rights activists in the 1960s race riots were often disgusted with the looting and the attitude of the looters. Tilly (2003) thus categorized these riots as only marginally racial protests that degenerated into opportunistically seeking private gain. But this is to omit the part that looting, along with arson, play in the dynamics of riots: looting is a mass recruiter and a momentum sustainer. Without it, if the riot took nothing but the form of violent confrontations with the police, the riot could be easily dealt with by police withdrawing until the crowd became bored, drifted away, and disassembled; or it could be put down by putting in overwhelming force against the inevitable small group that would actively confront it. Looters are the foot-soldiers of a riot; better put, they are the half-hearted hanging-back, the 85 percent who never fire their guns. Looting is a brilliant tactical invention – so to speak, because no one invented it – since it takes the relatively useless part of the supporters and onlookers of an insurrection and turns them into activists of sorts, keeping alive the emotional atmosphere that is where a moral holiday lives or dies. 

In the Collins view, rioting is mostly farce, and people smash store windows because it’s fun. Collins talks about interesting facts consistent with this – much of what people steal is of minimal value, and sometimes they don’t even know what they’re going to do with it. Looters generally don’t steal from each other, but mostly are egging each other on instead. And even within the moral holiday, there are relatively few instances of sexual assault, which isn’t what you’d expect if it were a total free for all with no civic order. There’s a particular atmosphere to it. 

In this reading, the most of the people at the riots just like smashing things and taking stuff. This provides cover for a much smaller group that actually wants to inflict real violence. Even within the violent contingent, a lot of the actual violence has a pantomime, staged aspect. On the side of the rioters, this is mostly like soccer hooliganism. If the Chelsea Headhunters want to get in a biffo with the Everton County Road Cutters, they have to organize when and where they’re going to turn up, and set the ground rules on what weapons are allowed. If the other guys get killed, the cops are going to get involved and then the fun is over, so you can’t have knives or guns.

But putting a bullet in a cop's head, even if you could get away with it, just doesn't seem like fun to the average person, even the average person at a riot. Mostly, people don't like inflicting real violence. As Collins notes, at gun ranges, people vastly prefer to shoot at highly stylized silhouettes, zombies, circles - anything but photos of actual humans. And when they do, they mostly want the bad guys on the target to be wearing sunglasses, so you don't have to see their eyes. It's disconcerting, even when it's just a photo. 

If you take the Collins view, these riots, like most riots, are very unlikely to have any important political consequences, and will likely peter out in a few days at most, as people just get bored. I think this is the way to bet, actually. Social media can sustain things much longer than in previous days, but eventually the momentum of it wears off. 

The one weak part of the Collins these, however, is that it doesn’t address at all the question of police. How come they’re so restrained? Do they have no other choice? Admittedly, in the 60s they sent in troops to actually shoot the place up, so back then they did feel they had a choice. Collins seems to implicitly think they just get overwhelmed, which is certainly part of it. 

But the other extreme version of the dynamics is the game theory aspect. Stated briefly, it is as follows – guns are to mobs and police what nuclear weapons are to war. They absolutely affect the strategic calculation, but both sides have strong incentives to make sure they’re off the equilibrium path. 

Which is to say, the police are not actually allowing anarchy. Arresting business owners that shoot at looters is, on its face, a pretty striking example of anarcho-tyranny. But the other reading is as follows. The police in the riot gear have retreated to a temporary but well-understood revised rules of engagement, which are these. Only minimal resources will get deployed to stop violence against property, and you will likely only get in trouble if you are somehow actually caught in the act. Projectiles will be met with tear gas, and if necessary, with rubber bullets. But if you start shooting real guns or using real knives and real baseball bats, at best you’re going to jail for a long time, and lots of resources will be deployed to find you. If it’s against us (the cops), you’re going home in a body bag. The police not being deployed to protect shop windows are being reserved to make extra sure of this fact. 

Don't get me wrong, the anarcho-tyranny reading still has a fair bit to recommend. But the chief difference is the claim that this isn't really anarchy - if they stopped preventing people burning buildings, or robbing houses, then you'd see real death and destruction. 

But both theories beat the hell out of the mainstream explanation for police restraint, which is that city governments are rationally acting to not inflame the mob, because this would risk provoking an even bigger backlash, and they’d lose control entirely. Militarily, this is not a hard problem. An uncoordinated, untrained, and incoherent mob gets slaughtered by a well-armed, well-trained army. Not only that, but the idea of violent counter-escalation is trivially disproved by this video. Watch it, it’s astounding.

Turns out the Latin Kings gang in Chicago takes a dim view to people turning up to loot their neighborhood. And they’ll pull out a piece and tell you to GTFO, or you’ll get shot. Everybody knows that they are serious. Everybody knows that smashing the liquor store window is not worth it. So the window doesn’t get smashed. More importantly, nobody actually needs to get shot either. In this respect, the Latin Kings are able to prevent property damage, which is a pretty important measure of governance, than the CPD. The comparison is not quite fair, because the Kings just need to defend a small patch of turf, don’t mind beating the wrong people up to achieve it, and there is likely complete organizational support for all this. The CPD has to pacify the whole city, while being instructed by a deeply suspicious city government and legal apparatus that has made clear that they may not protect them from legal consequences themselves if any riot prevention happens to look bad on camera. But still. 

I seriously can’t get over that video. Is there anyone alive who actually thinks that the Latin Kings shooting a looter would be a bad idea because more looters would come back and try to start s*** with the Latin Kings? To ask it is to laugh. As Keyser Soze said, they have the will to do what the other guy wouldn’t. Not just being willing to shoot the gun. But being willing to do it in defense of a shop window. Firing the nukes is always off the equilibrium path. But it makes a great deal of difference to what happens as to what issues each of the two sides is willing to go nuclear on.

And it’s easy to see how the CPD ceding effective authority to the Latin Kings looks like the collapse of late Roman Britain. In that case, a failing state exercised less and less authority over its far flung regions. Local garrison commanders were still in charge, notionally on behalf of Rome. But Rome hasn’t sent any word for a decade, and hasn’t sent any funds in much longer. Taxes are levied in kind on the local populace. And the main guy is able to keep his band of men together, and provide desperately needed defense against the raiding Picts and Scoti. Do this long enough, and now you’re in charge. You can call yourself Warlord, or King, or Centurion, or whatever. It ultimately doesn’t matter. You’re now the government. If the future of America is Latin Kings government, the depressing prospect is that you might get a smaller chance of having your windows smashed (although likely a higher chance of getting shot).

But as a gambling man, I don’t think it will come to that. Roman Britain collapsed slowly, but it didn’t collapse from riots (although Constantinople almost did, so who knows). 

Randall Collins wrote "Violence" in 2008. Back then it was still acceptable in polite society to say that rioters smash windows because smashing windows is fun to a lot of people. I don't think he'd be able to write that today under his real name with respect to the current protests - he'd be run out of the Penn Sociology Department on a rail. These riots did manage to kill stone dead the endless drumbeat of virus stories, and even if things get worse, I suspect it will be hard to get people to care in the same way as before, once it became clear that it was mostly the elderly dying anyway. Serious social distancing is likely gone for good, whether for better or worse. 

The bottom line, though, is that I think this will probably fizzle in a few days, without important long term consequences. I might be wrong – if there were a political VIX index, it would be considerably elevated. But not December 2008 elevated, nor March 2020 elevated.  Then again, betting that the great deal of ruin in a nation will continue to last is like the carry trade. It works great, but every now and then you lose your shirt.