Rioting

Over at City Journal, Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit by Charles Fain Lehman

The summer of 2025 has not yet officially begun, but it already looks like another long, hot one. Los Angeles has faced days of anti-ICE protests and rioting, which have spread to dozens of other cities, provoking clashes with local, state, and federal law enforcement. The burning cars and mask-clad demonstrators are disturbingly reminiscent of the riots for “racial justice” in the summer of 2020 and for “Palestine” in 2024. The cause changes; the personnel and methods remain the same.

He left out a lot of urban racial violence. the Kyle Rittenhouse acquital and Derek Chavin's conviction both brought riots. Atlanta 2023, Minneapolis ongoing. The usual method is for professional agitators to glom on to a peaceful protest, hoping to either bait the police into escalating or get the peaceful protestors to start getting physical, not necessarily by shooting or fighting, but by forcing their way into places or refusing to follow police orders. Rioting also provides an opportunity for looting, much as raping and pillaging were considered part of a soldier's entitlement for taking a city. 

The linked article talks about how this is longstanding, quoting from  Edward C Banfield's 1970 book The Unheavenly City.  

Put more succinctly: while Banfield’s contemporaries blamed riots on “root causes,” Banfield blamed riots on those who blamed them on root causes. People riot for all sorts of reasons, but the most tractable one is that they feel permission to riot—because their leaders give it to them.