Social unrest là gì

FormationEdit

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 use media, and social media, to connect with potential crowd-members, and incite them to break the law, or to attempt to provoke others into doing so, without having any direct personal contact. Conversely, a skilled leader person can also calm, or divert, a crowd using strategic suggestions or commands, or appealing to them with reason in order to deescalate a situation.[1]

Emotional contagion greatly influences crowd behavior by providing the crowd a psychological sense of "unity." This sense may provide the crowd with the momentum to absorb a mob mentality, and to take on mob behavior. Crowd-members feed off of each other's excitement, which produces a high state of collective emotion. The ideas crowd leaders rapidly transmit throughout the group, and also to bystanders, rubberneckers, 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 cannot only endanger the crowd, but also others.[1] During civil disorder, panic can set in when a crowd member realizes

• They are in danger and fleeing is necessary to escape arrest or harm
• Few escape routes exist
• The few escape routes are congested with traffic
• Their actions have caused harm to others
• When they have not dispersed the scene quickly enough, that their life, or freedom, is at risk from encroaching law enforcement agents[1]

A goal of violent demonstrators is to spur law enforcers to take actions 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.[1]

Most participants of civil disorder engage on foot. However, organized efforts, 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] If the violence is not pre-arranged, 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 implore the use of fire or hidden explosive devices e.g. strapped to animals, masked in cigarette lighters or toys, rigged to directed vehicles, etc.[1] Not only can they be used to create confusion or diversion, but they can also be used destroy property, and 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]