BY HANK REICHMAN

Yesterday I posted to this blog a piece that compared the current protests against police violence with the urban rebellions of prior years, especially the 1960s.  In it I wrote that “the looting, arson, and window-smashing that have marred the overwhelmingly peaceful protests . . . may have been carried out by a handful of political extremists, left and right, who probably envision these events as prelude to some fantastical revolution or civil war.  It could also be that semi-organized criminal gangs, with no political agenda, are taking advantage of the unrest.”  And, I added, “we can’t deny that some young people, facing a bleak future defined by pandemic, economic depression, and police violence, may have been overcome by their own anger and rage.  Probably all three factors are at play.”

Today it is becoming ever more clear that in many cases the second explanation may be the most accurate.  Almost all the organized and semi-organized street protests we are now seeing have been peaceful — except when they have been assaulted by the police (see also the photos here).  But at the same time an entirely separate crime wave has gripped several major cities, as the perpetrators take advantage of police concentration on controlling protest and arresting en masse those who are at worst committing civil disobedience by violating curfews.  Despite the cries of “law and order” and “domination” of the streets from the malevolent phony Bible-thumper in the White House and his allies, a wave of crime against property is taking place right under their eyes — and they not only seem incapable of controlling it, they seem content to ignore it while seeking to use fear of that criminality to tarnish opposition to their policies and rule.

That, at least, is much of the experience in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live.  Here is what the San Francisco Chronicle reports this morning:

what was once traditionally a metropolitan problem has gone mobile and gone bigger.  Roving thieves are hitting outlying cities like Walnut Creek, Fairfield and Vallejo.

Many of the hits were sophisticated, said San Leandro Police Chief Jeff Tudor.  On Sunday night, officers reported traffic clustered with coordinated vehicles, some loaded up four-to-five deep in vans.

The vehicles would hit an area in tandem, with a getaway driver dropping off their passengers and others, in various locations, acting as lookouts.

On Friday night in Oakland, dozens stormed an uptown Target as alarms blared.  The groups formed an assembly line of sorts, one member running a supermarket sweep down the aisles while others waited outside for the handoffs.

In more extreme incidents, officers have been fired upon and members of the public have been shot. . .

In San Leandro, police said at least 73 cars were stolen Sunday night from a Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram dealership, though employees place the number at more than 100.  Police spokesman Lt. Ted Henderson said the stolen cars included new Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcats, a powerful sports car priced at $60,000 and up.

The grim account continues, but you get the point.  And although the story quotes an activist who charged that police were “instigating, pushing people back, not doing what they’re supposed to do per the rules,” it seems obvious that much of this had little to do with the protests and most frequently took place far from crowds assembled to demonstrate against police violence.

That was certainly what Chronicle columnist Phil Matier concluded:

Shots fired in Emeryville while looting was going on was just one episode in the string of chaotic scenes that appeared to be organized groups of looters who swarmed shopping districts and malls throughout the East Bay.  The looters’ targets were often miles from the demonstrations in Oakland and elsewhere over the death of George Floyd, who died last week after being restrained by police in Minneapolis.

“A lot of people want to mix the two together, but there are two distinct groups here.  This is just criminal activity,” said Berkeley police spokesman Byron White, who was posted at the Fourth Street shopping district Sunday night.

White said mobile caravans — some as long as 10 cars — rolled off Interstate 80 throughout the night.

“There were three or four people to a car,” White said.  “They would see us and, they would get all big-eyed and speed out of the area.  We were able to stop some of the cars.  We recovered stolen property, guns, even one stolen vehicle,” White said.  “They were from all over the place, El Sobrante, Rodeo, Hercules.”

None of the people in the cars appeared to have anything to do with the protests, White said. . . .

“Some of the groups are pretty well organized,” Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern said.  “With the advent of cell phones and apps and social media, they have people who go out and scout for them on what law enforcement is doing around areas they are going to hit.” . . .

Ahern said Monday night appeared to be calmer than the weekend, as the looters moved north into Contra Costa and Solano counties.  Monday’s demonstration in Oakland, which drew thousands of people into the downtown was also largely vandalism free.

In St. Louis protest organizers made clear that police should know the difference between genuine protesters and those who take advantage of the action to commit crimes, either out of anger and frustration or greed.  “They have infiltrated our organizations, so they ought to know who is responsible,” the Rev. Darrel Gray told a reporter.  “There is a push for justice, and then there is a criminal element,” added Bishop Elijah Hankerson, president of the Clergy Coalition.  “They are two different elements altogether.  Others would like to hijack this movement, which is a valid movement.  What happened to George Floyd — that was a murder.  We don’t want anyone hiding behind our movement.  Because once it’s hijacked, people will try to make the whole thing out to be invalid.”

Gray also noted that curfew enforcement will likely contribute to confusing civil disobedience with unprincipled lawlessness.  “A curfew sets up a situation where people will violate the curfew as an act of civil disobedience,” he  said.  “Don’t lump the group violating the curfew as an act of civil disobedience in with those who violate the curfew for their own purposes.”

Experts on protest and crowd control have long known that “when the police respond by escalating force—wearing riot gear from the start, or using tear gas on protesters—it doesn’t work.  In fact, disproportionate police force is one of the things that can make a peaceful protest not so peaceful.”  But why are police doing just this, even as they are hamstrung by their very own concentration on the protests in efforts to control crimes against property committed by organized gangs with little, if any, connection to those protests?  Well, there’s entrenched police culture and “the political power of police unions, the impunity granted by police contracts, and the culture of silence enforced by both,” to quote Atlantic magazine writer Adam Serwer.

As this is a blog about higher education and I’m an historian I will add that historians too have long known that times of political unrest are often also characterized by crime waves, which may exist largely independent of radical political agitation.  Take, for example, the Russian Revolution of 1917.  In 2017 Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, published Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd, in which he demonstrated, to quote the publisher’s blurb, how amid the chaos of the revolutionary year, “crime flourished.  Gangs of criminals, deserters, and hooligans brazenly roamed the streets.  Mass prison escapes became common.  And vigilantism spread widely as ordinary citizens felt compelled to take the law into their own hands, often meting out mob justice on suspected wrongdoers.”  This continued after the Bolsheviks seized power.  They were only able to bring it under control by rebranding much apolitical crime as counter-revolutionary activity.

To be sure, we are not now in a revolution and, despite my greater sympathy than most for the revolutionaries of 1917, I’m glad we’re not.  Nevertheless, historian Rebecca Spang, an expert on 18th-century France at Indiana University, has suggested in a piece last month in The Atlantic that we may well be in a revolutionary era:

Fear sweeps the land.  Many businesses collapse.  Some huge fortunes are made.  Panicked consumers stockpile paper, food, and weapons.  The government’s reaction is inconsistent and ineffectual.  Ordinary commerce grinds to a halt; investors can find no safe assets.  Political factionalism grows more intense.  Everything falls apart.

That, Spang notes, describes France in 1789 but also, to a great extent, the U.S. in 2020.  She continues:

The United States may not be having a revolution right now, but we are surely living in revolutionary times.  If we do not perceive them as such, it is because news coverage and everyday conversations alike turn on nonhuman agents.  Instead of visionary leaders or outraged crowds, viruses, markets, and climate change seem to shape events today.  History feels like it is out of our hands.

People sometimes imagine yesterday’s revolutions as planned and carried out by self-conscious revolutionaries, but this has rarely, if ever, been the case.  Instead, revolutions are periods in which social actors with different agendas (peasants stealing rabbits, city dwellers sacking tollbooths, lawmakers writing a constitution, anxious Parisians looking for weapons at the Bastille Fortress) become fused into a more or less stable constellation.  The most timeless and emancipatory lesson of the French Revolution is that people make history.  Likewise, the actions we take and the choices we make today will shape both what future we get and what we remember of the past.

For Spang the French revolutionary experience provides both a cautionary but also a hopeful model.  Pointing to several pointed analogies between the era leading up to 1789 and our own, she declares,

That comparisons can so easily be made between the beginning of the French Revolution and the United States today does not mean that Americans are fated to see a Reign of Terror or that a military dictatorship like Napoleon’s looms large in our future.  What it does mean is that everything is up for grabs.  The United States of America can implode under external pressure and its own grave contradictions, or it can be reimagined and repurposed.  Life will not go back to normal for us, either, because the norms of the past decades are simply no longer tenable for huge numbers of Americans.

That this is true is demonstrated by both the crime and the protest of recent days.  Both send a message that had already been delivered by the COVID virus: we can’t go on like this.  We need change.  Let’s just work hard to make sure it will be change that will be of benefit to and welcomed by those who are today so courageously and persistently taking to the streets in the name of justice.