Riots and the Police: What’s the Connection?
Another look at Steven Pinker’s claim
If we did not have the police, all hell would break loose. Wouldn’t it?
Steven Pinker, in his famous passage from the Blank Slate, implies it would. “When law enforcement vanishes,” he says, “all manner of violence breaks out.”
He refers to a 1969 incident in Montreal when the police went on strike. “By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties, to restore order.”
The implication is that police are custodians of social order, and that chaos ensues when the police abandon their posts.
This conclusion has garnered widespread acceptance because it makes sense on the surface. Nobody wants to rob a bank in full view of uniformed officers and patrol cars. We believe most would-be criminals assess the risk of getting incarcerated against the reward of their crime and the threat of arrest deters crime or keeps it manageable. We conclude that, in the absence of police presence, people would lose respect for their communities, cause havoc, run amok, destroy property and kill people willy-nilly.
In sum, we deduce social order depends on the presence of the police. The 1969 incident appears like an open and shut case of cause and effect. But can it be tested or falsified? Do riots break out every time police go on strike? Does the phenomenon repeat itself in the same circumstances? Does it apply to human nature and society at large or just in Montreal and only during the month of October? Does social order reign while police are working? And how did societies manage before police forces became established?
Turns out the Montreal incident matches results around the world. While we cannot be certain it applies in every case, we do know that violence, looting and death immediately followed the declaration of police strikes in 1918 in Liverpool England, in 1919 in Boston, in 1923 in Melbourne, Australia, in 1974 in Baltimore, 2010 in Ecuador, and 2013 in Argentina. More recently in Brazil, all manner of violence broke out when the police went on strike in the state of Espírito Santo. Within one week in 2017, 122 people lost their lives mainly due to clashes among criminal gangs.
One could conclude from these phenomena that the police are effective agents of social order and that, as long as police are working their regular shifts, we behave ourselves. But we know this is not so. All manner of violence also breaks out while the police are patrolling the streets in full gear.
Before the Montreal police strike in 1969, the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) bombed the Stock Exchange, wounding 53 people and causing $1 million in damage. A month earlier, the FLQ bombed the mayor’s home. In fact, from 1963 to 1970, the FLQ detonated no less than 95 bombs, targeting City Hall, army recruiting offices, and the Montreal police themselves, using tons of dynamite stolen from military and industrial sites. These all happened while police were not on strike.
Rewind to 1849 when 1200 people burned down the Montreal Parliament buildings while 120 police officers were on the job. Fast forward to the 1993 Stanley Cup riot in the same city when almost 50 police cars were destroyed in the presence of almost 1000 officers, 50 of whom were injured.
Hockey seems to turn peaceful Canadians into nutty banshees. Over on the west coast when the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup in 1994, Vancouver fans caused 200 injuries and over $1 million in damage even though 540 cops were commissioned to keep order. Seventeen years later, fans repeated the rage fest when their team lost the Cup yet again, burning police cars in front of an allegedly prepared force of 800 officers.
Add these to the list of Canadian riots while police are not on strike: Winnipeg 1919, Bloody Sunday Vancouver 1938, Halifax 1945, Gastown (Vancouver) 1971, Quebec City 2001 and Toronto 2010. In several of these, the riots took place in spite of, or because of, organized riot-planning by the city police forces in cooperation with provincial and federal forces.
In Gastown the city cops attacked a peaceful protest in favor of legalizing marijuana. In Quebec City, RCMP fired rubber and plastic bullets directly at peaceful protestors’ heads and groins, and disbursed excessive tear gas at teams of medics attempting to provide first aid. In Toronto, 20,000 officers were commissioned to deal with 10,000 protestors, and yet almost 100 of those officers were injured. One video shows a protestor being brutally beaten by 12 cops who first disguised their ID badges. And this is just Canada.
In fact, when it comes to the most extreme, life-threatening forms of social disorder, police forces seem helpless to prevent or mitigate damage. Name any riot over the past 300 years anywhere in the world where police had any success stopping it from occurring or protecting property and lives. Police often show up after the fact, arresting ringleaders and vandals. While they can help restore order, by acting as bodyguards to public figures and buildings, do they have any real influence on the general safety and security of ordinary people?
During six-day LA riots of 1992, $1 billion worth of property was demolished or stolen, 63 people were killed, almost 3000 people were injured, and over 1000 buildings were destroyed. Thousands of LAPD officers, 1,100 Marines, 600 army soldiers and 6,500 National Guard troops planned and trained for this reaction to the Rodney King verdict. Yet they were no match for the heat of the people’s rage.
The LA riots are only one example of many in the United States that unleashed havoc while the police were on the job. Los Angeles 1965, Detroit 1967, Newark 1967, Chicago 1968, New York 1977, Seattle 1999, and Cincinnati 2001 are only the most extreme of a rambling list of riots over the past few decades, let alone over the past two centuries.
Far from being helpless to stop the destruction or slow it down, police may even cause uprisings, or exacerbate the damage. The 1965 LA riots seem to have been stirred by perpetual police brutality over the Watts neighborhood. The Detroit riot of 1967 started when cops raided a bar and arrested everyone inside: five days later 43 people were dead and over two thousand buildings were destroyed. The LA riots would never have happened if two officers, with 20 of their colleagues looking on, had not beaten Rodney King senseless. The Cincinnati riots persisted for four days after police shot and killed Timothy Thomas, an unarmed teenager who was simply running away. Riots broke out all over London, England after the police shot and killed Mark Duggan in 2011.
In the past five years alone, mobs of people in dozens of US cities have rioted in response to the police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Antonio Martin, Freddie Gray, Mansur Ball-Bey, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Keith Lamont Scott, and Anthony Lamar Smith.
Riots are not a sign of human nature out of control. They do not suggest we are rabid at the core. Riots are a reaction, and usually a predictable one. Most rioters lash out against perceived injustice, even when that injustice means “my team should have won the Cup.” More often, rioters react to a series of public infractions such as prolonged police harassment, topped off by a trigger such as a fatal shooting that sends neighborhoods over the edge.
Riots are often a last resort when all other avenues of protest, reform or refusal have proven to be, or appear to be, futile. They are a simple physical or chemical reaction no different than a dam breaking or water boiling. Even where peaceful protests turn into a storm of blood and death, you can predict the outcome when armed forces march into the city wearing helmets and plexiglass shields to confront the unarmed protesters with tear gas and bayonets. Violence is the inevitable result, and in these cases, nobody can claim the police are peace-keepers.
Which brings us back to police strikes. Although riots are a reactive phenomenon to the absence of police on patrol, they are not prompted by indignation or rage. Instead, people who are already disposed to desperate measures will take advantage of an opportunity they know is going to be short-lived. Suddenly, the connection between harmful action and legal consequence is broken. But they know that, once the recess is over, they will have to return to normal behavior. So thieves and looters act quickly — sometimes within mere hours — to grab as much of a thrill as they can.
Two questions arise here: how long would the mayhem continue if the police strike continued with no reinforcements? And if there were no such thing as a police force, would these people behave this way every day?
After all, police forces are a relatively recent addition to human society. We’ve been living together in communities for tens of thousands of years and only in the past few centuries have police become an integral part of a typical urban civil commons. For the UK and North America, one might cite the establishment of the London police as the start of modern public police forces, but similar troops existed around the world as enforcers of the king’s law since the time of Hammurabi six thousand years ago. As civilization gradually replaced primitive societies throughout the globe, and as urban density increased, officials in uniforms became a staple of the city street.
How did we maintain social order before kings and emperors invaded the scene? We must have had some way to safeguard ourselves and our property. Of course we did. We policed ourselves, protecting our neighbors and meting out our own primitive forms of retribution for infractions of the social contract. Guilt, peer pressure, and the threat of banishment combined with each individual’s empathy and interdependence to make cooperation far more likely than disturbing the peace. We did not need law, courts, or prisons to moderate our dark side.
And we still don’t. As Mark Hauser explains in his compelling study Moral Minds, “our moral instincts are immune to the explicitly articulated commandments handed down by religion and governments.” These instincts are the beating heart of human culture both primitive and civilized. Policing has nothing whatsoever to do with human morals or moral behavior.
From its inception, policing is intended to protect the king’s property and enforce penalties for infractions of the king’s laws. Read any officer’s oath in any city around the world: the Number One goal is allegiance to the nation, its laws and its political leaders. It does not enforce those laws through persuasion, negotiation, prevention or mentoring. It does so through the threat of physical force. When you are caught speeding, you could drive away with a ticket demanding $85, but you could also be imprisoned, maimed or killed. You may own a gun and may actually use it, but only the police can inflict violence with impunity.
Due to the central presence of the police in our society, and due to this power imbalance, committing property crimes becomes more of an act against authority rather than a harm against another human being. And no wonder. If I rob a store, the greatest risk is not that the property owner will catch me in the act. The greatest risk is that the cops will catch me, arrest me, and throw me in prison. The cops, the courts, the judges, and the prison wardens will all get a piece of me. The one whose property I have actually harmed will have a relatively insignificant role in the whole affair.
This brings us back to the 1969 riots in Montreal. Yes, to use Pinker’s words, all manner of violence does break out when the police announce they are taking a recess. But it’s not because the police are custodians of social order. It’s because they are custodians of all manner of violence. When those who own exclusive license to violence abandon their posts, the young and reckless among us rush to grab some of those exclusive rights, if only for a day.
