In the United States, sports cause more riots than anything else
More than half of all American championship games or series are accompanied by a riot, making sport the country's most common trigger. Almost all of them break out in the city of the team that won, and close scores, long series and championship races all raise the odds of trouble.
Riots have many other causes: poverty, unemployment, bad living conditions, oppressive government, taxes, conscription, ethnic or religious conflict, and frustration with legal routes for complaint. Food shortages are a classic spark. Rising prices drove keelmen on the Tyne to riot in 1709 and tin miners to plunder granaries at Falmouth in 1727, and hundreds of thousands rioted in Egypt in 1977 after food subsidies ended. The Nika riots of Constantinople began with rival chariot-racing fans.
The popular image of a mindless mob may be wrong. A body of research suggests rioters do not simply follow herd instinct but act according to inverted social norms. Deterrence has its own logic: a high chance of arrest discourages rioting more than harsh penalties, yet as a crowd grows, each person's risk of being caught shrinks, which draws still more people in.
Law draws precise lines. In England and Wales the Public Order Act 1986 defines riot as 12 or more people together using or threatening unlawful violence for a shared purpose, in a way that would make a person of reasonable firmness fear for their safety. One person can be convicted provided at least twelve were involved, and the maximum sentence is ten years. The old common law offence was abolished on 1 April 1987. Under the earlier Riot Act, an official had to read the proclamation with the wording exactly right before force could be used, and a crowd that stayed put could then face lethal force.
The term race riot had entered American English by the 1890s, at first describing attacks by a majority group on people of other perceived races. Police forces today keep specialist public-order units, such as France's Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité and the Netherlands' Mobiele Eenheid, and use water cannon, pepper spray and baton rounds described as less than lethal. Such weapons still kill: rubber bullets caused seventeen deaths in Northern Ireland between 1970 and 2005.
Source: Riot
