I’m pretty perplexed by this story on the riots in LA in response to the Lakers win. I’m not a sports fan or anything so I really have no exposure to this sort of thing.
Supposedly the rioters were fans of the team that won, so what gives? As foreign as it seems to me to care that passionately about a sports team, I can at least understand a violent response to a loss, but what is the thought process behind this sort of a response to a victory?
I can’t even stretch my understanding of human behavior to believe that a large group of otherwise functioning people would just be so happy that they would destroy property, harm random people, and very possibly end up hurt or in jail.
From what I’ve heard, alcohol plays a major role. People drink to celebrate their team winning, which results in their getting drunk, and drunk people sometimes do things that don’t make a lot of sense.
We had some of this in Pittsburgh when we won the Super Bowl. Fortunately the cops were hard and heavy in their presence Friday night after the Stanley Cup win so that we didn’t see a repeat.
I think that there are two things that you’re discounting.
First, mob behavior. People behave differently when they’re just one of a crowd. They go along with things that they’d otherwise never do. They shut off their reasoning capacity and engage the primitive parts of the brain and go wild, feeling insulated by the numbers around them.
Second, and most importantly: alcohol. Of the few people who police managed to arrest here in in the winter, every single one was blotto. Blood alcohol levels three and four times over the legal driving limit. Pour enough booze down someone’s throat and they turn into a drooling ape, and behave accordingly. Put a bunch of drooling apes together, and they tear a city down.
I am a Detroiter and when the Lions win the Superbowl next year, watch out.
I have been at a couple Detroit Tiger celebrations. Escalation is often caused by the mobs rooting a goofball on. Once a guy climbed up on a light pole outside of the Lindell A.C. He just sat on it until people yelled at him to start rocking it. He did and had it rocking pretty badly. it was dangerous.
Yeah I would agree with alcohol but also the mob mentality even moreso. I was in Pittsburgh the other night for the celebration also, and even though I’m ashamed of myself now, I found myself going along with the crowd when they chanted “HOSSA HOSSA.”
Ok I’m down with the devil’s brew of alcohol and a mob mentality, but then i can’t imagine anything other than a sporting event frequently creating these kinds of issues in a society such as ours.
I mean let’s take anything else that large varied groups of people may passionately care about deeply, say political elections. I spent a good part of the most recent election night at various events and celebrations that were packed with elated supporters of the winner. Many of the proceedings were rowdy and boisterous, and all of them involved alcohol. There was plenty of ritualism, group mentality, chanting, cheering, singing, mocking the losers, and all sorts of silly displays of human emotion in large groups. Not once did I feel there was a likelihood everyone was going to run outside to flip some cars over or set fires. What in this situation was missing from the devil’s brew?
There are plenty of massive events that people care enough about the celebrate in groups with the sauce. Why aren’t there riots when the winner of American Idol is announced? Am I thinking about this too much?
You’re forgetting the ‘Asshole factor’. The Asshole doesn’t watch American Idol and doesn’t vote, much less care about election outcomes–but the all-important ballgame, “Hell Yeah!!!”
The Asshole sees an opportunity, and taking advantage of the anonymity that a crowd affords acts out his nastier urges. The many semi-Assholes present egg him on and even participate.
Most celebrants look down on the actions of the Assholes–but they still look. They’re the crowd of onlookers. It seems, on first viewing these things on video, that they were all involved. A closer look reveals that only a few Assholes flipped the police car and set it on fire and broke the shop windows in search of more stuff to burn.
Assholes are always on the lookout for an excuse to act out, and ways to get others to join in on the destruction. Just be thankful that most Assholes don’t get the opportunities that the truly great Assholes of history got.
I don’t get it either. I was thrilled when my team won the Superbowl. But I didn’t go smash anything. Nor would have thought to. But as someone pointed out, drunk people - and I’ll be so sexist as to say drunk men in particular - often do stupid things.
My armchair theory: these are the people with a need to feel powerful, to feel like they have an effect on the universe. You can have an effect on the universe by either creating something or destroying something.
It’s much easier to destroy something. (I think this is similar to why kids bully other kids.)
As noted, the alcohol and the encouraging mob help to obscure the Asshole’s fears/inhibitions. But I think it has to start with an internal desire for puissance.
Well, in some parts of the world, political rallies often turn into riots. And the political movements of the 30s had plenty of that sort of stuff.
When you get a critical mass of political violence, you get assholes to join political parties/paramilitaries because they think the violence is fun, not because they care so much about politics.
Political rallies are usually sponsored by somebody–typically a candidate or a committee or a party. The sponsor will arrange the venue in advance and probably take security precautions–limiting alcohol and keeping an eye out for trouble-makers. They know that the absolute worst thing that can happen is for supporters to get out of control–nobody wants to see a headline “Obama Supporters Trash Downtown Street in Drunken Celebration”.
(Even so, political rallies do sometimes get out of control; in the sleepy suburban town in which I live, the 1989 mayoral election was marred by a “victory parade” which turned into a drunken melee in which five people were hospitalized.)
By way of analogy, when the Bulls were winning championships in the 1990’s, we never had any problem at the officially sanctioned victory celebrations in Grant Park. The problem was the night of the games, when people would spill out of bars for impromptu parties in the streets, and drink, and celebrate, and drink, and pretty soon police cars were being overturned.
