Mobs and Riots

The "flash mob" thugs can always be where the police aren't. Without massive proactive cell-phone surveillance there's no way to be ready--and even that wouldn't be useful for long. The mobsters are clever enough to come up with new code phrases, or buy cell phones via proxy, and all the surveillance would do is provide evidence for conspiracy charges against those the police were actually able to find. And that word "proactive" should make you nervous. It will worry people who happen to look something like the current groups of thugs.

So to first order--forget the police. They cannot stop the attackers and will probably never catch any but the very careless.

As usual, the problems are both acute and chronic and efforts to deal with one aspect will make dealing with the other problematic.

So how do you deal with the acute problem--the threat of a mob of thugs breaking your head or robbing you blind? There are limits to what you can do with dogs or concealed carry--no doubt sometimes helpful but not a general solution. Situational awareness: yes, know who's around and where retreats and impromptu weapons are; that can help. But without a group willingness to join together to fight back you're still going to be alone against the mob. Unless people will run to help when they hear a cry for help, the odds of a short-term good outcome are poor. Do we have that? Can we get it?

Also poor are the odds of a long-term good outcome. One contributing factor to grand lawlessness is the lack of social constraint on petty lawlessness, and a big factor in that lack is the absence of a sense of "we're all in this together." Remember the broken-window effect in New York? Successful petty crime and a lack of any push-back or cleanup breeds a sense of invulnerability in the criminals and potential criminals--"the winners are the destructive and violent, so let's be winners."

I suggest that a willingness of honest citizens to band together both to fight off attacks and to present a united front against petty offenses is good in the short and long term. I'm not sure the surviving thugs will reform in the medium term.

The devil finds work for idle hands, and one classic approach to dealing with youth disturbances is to try to get the youth employed. This won't work well with the older thugs--and I'm afraid from what I've seen over the years that "older" here probably means not out of grade school. I'm not sanguine about the odds for older youth because: well, who's going to hire them? There aren't a lot of jobs to start with, and most employers like the help to show up and actually work--and the ghetto doesn't train you to do either. And the jobs there are aren't going to pay enough to match what Americans of all stripes think they're entitled to. Even with a thorough-going "moral cleanup" I fear we have a lost generation in the pipeline there. A sense of envy, of entitlement, and of despair don't motivate a lot of Horatio Algers. Add consumerism pumped in by ubiquitous ads and nihilism and hate from the music--it is an uphill climb.

Its been climbed before, though.

The racist aspect to the flash mobs is an ugly complication. It won't help race relations if situational awareness demands that we start keeping a wary eye out on the movements of black teenagers in the vicinity. Undoubtedly other criminal groups will find the flash mob technique useful (department stores circulated warnings about gypsy gangs with similar tactics years ago), and that will somewhat dilute the racial factor. Just like in Britain--the initial rioters were black, but the followups are ghetto youth of all races, attacking and looting for the joy of it.

For some reason that doesn't encourage me.