University of DelawareDisaster Research Center

ARTICLE#15

WHAT LOOTING IN CIVIL DISTURBANCESREALLY MEANS

Russell R. Dynesand

E.L. Quarantelli

Reprinted from Trans-Action 5 (May 1968): 9-14.

What Looting in Cz·vz! DisturbancesReally Means

Unlike the looting after disaJlerJ, looting in civil distmbancesconveYJ an important menage from the deprived JectOrf of the population

RUSSELL DYNES & E L QUARANTELLI

In March and April of this year, there were civil dis-turbances in Memphis, Tenn, Washington, D.C,Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore Many films andphotographs were taken of people looting otherpeople's property These looting incidents conformedto the pattern, for according to many reports peoplemay be found looting when a community is havingcertain kinds of crises.. One of these crises is causedby a natural disaster-a flood, hurricane, and so forthAnd the other is caused by a civil disturbance, likethe ones that have hit American cities every summersince the Watts outbreak of August 1965.

Natural disasters and civil disturbances give peoplea chance to help themselves to other people's goodsYet there are important, fascinating differences be·tween what happens in these two crisis situations.For example, looting is far more common in civildisturbances than in disasters ..Then too, the kinds ofgoods taken during these two crises are different Andpublic disdain for the act varies. Sometimes takingother people's property during a community crisis isnot even considered looting!

In order to examine the differences between thetwo crisis situations, let us analyze what happens to

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private property during natural disasters, and thencontrast this with the transfers of property that takeplace during civil disorders.

The word "looting" has military roots .. It impliesthat invading armies take property by force, generallywhen the rightful owner cannot protect it. Similarly,in civil disturbances "invading armies" plunder prop-erty left unguarded when the owner is forced out byviolence or the threat of violence. During disasters,according to common belief, "invading armies" ofopportunists take property left unguarded when theowner is forced out by the disaster

The looting that takes place in these situations isusually interpreted as evidence of human depravityIn periods of natural or civil chaos, goes the explana-tion, the human animal is stripped of his usual socialcontrols. Without them, he is not a noble savage, butan ignoble one. For the general public, reports oflooting are easy to incorporate into their images ofthe "criminal elements" who clean out the cornergrocery during a racial disturbance, or the fiends andghouls who roam disaster-stricken areas.

After the Galveston hurricane of 1900, publishedaccounts told of people being summarily shot when

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they were caught with pocketsful of severed fingerswith rings on them. In 1906, after the San Franciscoearthquake and fire, the Lor Angeler TimeJ reportedthat "looting by fiends incarnate made a hell brothof the center of the ruined district. Sixteen looterswere shot out of hand on April 19, while robbingthe dead .." In his reconstruction of events after theearthquake, reporter Q.A. Bronson noted "reports ....of" ..looters wantonly shot in their tracks by Federaltroops, miscreants hanged in public squares, and ghoulsfound cutting off the fingers and ears of corpses forrings and earrings attached."

Today, most radio and television accounts of dis-asters are less dramatic, but looting is still a majortheme. After a tornado hit some suburbs of Chicagoin April 1967, a county sheriff reportedly announcedthat "orders had gone out that beginning at 10 P.M

Friday, any looters were to be shot on sight"After a power failure blacked out the Cincinnati areain May 1967, a wire-service story told of the smashingof store windows and looting in Cincinnati and inneighboring Newport and Covington, Ky.

Public officials, expecting certain kinds of com-munity emergencies to activate human depravity, oftenrequest additional law enforcement. They mobilizeNational Guard units and take extra security measures.These steps are often taken upon the first reports ofa civil disturbance or a natural disaster. Frequently,before the situation has even developed, televisionand radio will report what ir expected to happen-thefear of looting and the steps being taken to prevent it.

That most people are concerned about looting incivil disorders and disasters is beyond dispute. Reliableevidence, however, points to a surprising fact: Whilelooting clearly does occur in civil disturbances, indisaster situations it is very rare ..

Many studies of disasters mention reportr of looting,but very few cite authenticated cases. One study thatdid inquire into actual cases of looting was theNational Opinion Research Center (N.O.R.C.) studyof White County, Ark., after it was ravaged by atornado in 1952. In the community that suffered thegreatest damage, about 1000 of the 1200 residentswere left homeless. A random sample of people fromthis town and adjacent areas were asked whether theyhad lost any property by looting Only 9 percent re-ported that they, or members of their immediatehousehold, had lost property that they even felt hadbeen taken by looters. And fully one-third of thesepeople were uncertain whether the loss was reallydue to looters, or whether the missing items had beenblown away or buried in the debris. Finally, most ofthe articles were of little value ..

In contrast, 58 percent of the people questionedsaid they had heard of othen' property being stolen ..In

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fact, 9 percent claimed that they had even seen lootingin progress or had seen looters being arrested. TheN.n.R.C study team on the scene, however, couldverify the theft of only two major items-a cash reg-ister and a piano.

Other disaster research confirms the rarity of looting ..A study made after the 1953 floods in the Netherlandsfound that, although there were many reports of loot-ing, law-enforcement agencies could discover not asingle verified case.. The Dutch researchers attributedmany of the reports of looting to memory lapses inthe immediate post-flood period, and pointed out thata number of people who reported thefts later foundthe missing items. Charles Fritz and J.H. Mathewson,in a review of disaster studies published up to 1956,concluded that "the number of verified cases of actuallooting in peacetime disasters, in the United States andin foreign countries, is small."

More recent studies point in the same direction. TheDisaster Research Center at Ohio State University, infield studies of more than 40 disasters both in theUnited States and abroad, has found extremely fewverified cases of looting. Actual police records supportthese findings. For example, in September 1965, themonth Hurricane Betsy struck New Orleans, majorcrimes in the city fell 26.6 percent below the rate forthe same month in the previous year. Burglaries re-ported to the police fell from 617 to 425 Thefts ofover $50 dropped from 303 to 264, and those under$50 fell from 516 to 366.

Misinterpreted Motives

Since all evidence is that looting is rare or non-existent in natural disasters, why do reports of lootingin disaster situations occur over and over again? Andwhy are these reports persistently believed, even whenthere is no clear evidence to back them up?

To answer these questions, we need to look at fourconditions that usually prevail in the immediate post-impact period: misinterpretations of observed behavior;misunderstandings over property ownership; inflatedreports of looting; and sensational coverage of disastersituations by the news media.

Reports of looting are often based on misinterpre-tation of people's motives .. After a disaster, masses ofpeople-often numbering in the thousands-convergeon the impact area. Local officials, particularly thosewith little experience in large-scale emergencies, fre-quently regard these convergers as sightseers-and, byextension, as potential looters. However, Fritz andMathewson have shown that there are at least fivedifferent types of convergers: the returnees-the dis-aster survivors who want to go back to the impactarea; the anxious-those concerned with the safety ofkin and friends; the helpers--those who want to donate

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their services; the curious-those attempting to makesome sense out of the unusual events that have oc-curred; and the exploiters-those seeking private gainfrom public misfortune. The number in this last cate-gory is small and includes, in addition to potentiallooters, souvenir hunters, relief stealers, and profiteers

The important point is that those who converge ona disaster area have a variety of motives. Communityofficials often do not seem to recognize this. Forexample, a property owner whose house has beendestroyed may return to the area to sift through thedebris of his own home in the hope of recovering lostarticles. To a casual observer, his behavior may looklike looting. Out-of-town relatives may come into adisaster area with a truck to help their kin collectand store their remaining possessions .. People engagedin informal search-and-rescue activities of this SOltmayalso appear to be looters. The souvenir hunter islooking for something that has symbolic rather thanmaterial value. But in the disaster context, his behaviortoo becomes suspect

Another source of false looting reports is the factthat, although little or no property is stolen in dis-aster situations, goods are frequently given away.Sometimes there is confusion about which items arefree, and who is entitled to them

In one disaster, the report began circulating that agrocery store had been looted. Investigation revealedthat the owner had placed damaged goods outside onthe sidewalk, announcing that anyone was welcome totake them. Since his store front had been demolished,however, the line between the free goods and theowner's undamaged stock was vague-and some peoplewho came to get the free goods inadvertently tookitems from the undamaged stock instead. This mis-understanding was soon cleared up. But an early reportof the incident, given to the military authorities in thearea, quickly spread throughout the community as anauthentic case of looting. And what's more, the lootingreport was later accepted as valid even by members ofthe military who had established that it was false.

Overblown estimates of disaster losses are the thirdsource of unfounded looting reports. Officials in adisaster area frequently tend to overestimate the seri-ousness of the situation, Messages about either thequantity of aid needed or the extent of the damagetend to mushroom as they pass from one person toanother, If one official asks another for 100 cots thesecond official may relay a request to a third officialfor 150 cots, and so on. In much the same way, reportsof looting get blown out of proportion,

The following incident occurred at a communica-tions center in a major metropolitan area that hadbeen hit by a hurricane: A patrolman in the field,talking over his radio, made a casual comment that,

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since some store fronts were open and could easilybe entered, perhaps a policeman might be dispatched tothat location. The patrolman who received this callwas busy for a few minutes with other queries. Thenhe made a call to the state police requesting that a forcebe rushed to that location-since, he said, "a hell ofa lot of looting is going on there."

Sensational news accounts round out the picture.Naturally, the mass media emphasize the dramatic.The atypical and the unique are what catch the news-man's attention. Photographs of disaster areas depictthe buildings that are destroyed, not the ones thatare still intact. And in press accounts, any stories aboutlooting-including the stories that are inaccurate andinflated-are quickly seized upon and highlighted.

These accounts are often accepted as reasonable de-scriptions of what is occurring even by communityofficials themselves. In the absence of up-to-date anddirect information, what happened or what is happen-ing is not easy to determine. The phone system may bedisrupted, preventing direct feedback of informationfrom field points. Movement may be severely restricted.Direct observation is often impossible, And the pres-sure for immediate action may prevent anyone fromkeeping accurate records. Since few people in anycommunity have much first-hand experience with large-scale disasters, journalistic accounts become a majormeans of defining reality. As one police chief saidin reply to a question about his knowledge of looting,"Well, I'm not sure, All I know right now is thereports I've heard over the radio .."

The upshot of all this is that many reported casesof post-disaster "looting," based on misinterpretationor misunderstanding and publicized by exaggerated orsensational accounts, are not really cases of looting atall. They involve no unlawful appropriations ofproperty.

Still, the fact remains that certain "illegal" appropri-ations of property do occur in disaster situations. Forexample, people sometimes break into stores and ware-houses without the owner's consent and take medicalsupplies, cots, generators, and flashlights. Now, is thislooting? And if not, why not?

Here we come to the critical element of "propertyredefinition." Incidents of this sort are not looting,The notion of "property" involves a shared under-staqding about who can do what with the valuedresources within a community. When a disaster strikes,property rights are temporarily redefined: There isgeneral agreement among community members thatthe resources of individuals become communityproperty.. Individual property rights are suspended, soappropriation of private resources-which would nor-mally be considered looting--is temporarily condoned.Before these resources can be given back to private

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use, the needs of the disoriented larger communityhave to be met.

When a natural crisis occurs, the usual plurality ofindividual goals gives way to the single, overridinggoal of the community-the goal of saving as manylives as possible .. Any way of achieving this becomeslegitimate. People who are trapped have to be rescued;people who are in dangerous areas have to be evacu-ated; people who have been injured have to be givenmedical attention; people who are missing, and perhapsinjured, must be found. If this means communityappropriation of private search equipment, medicalmaterial, and even vehicles, it is implicitly viewed asnecessary. In one case, a city attorney even made itofficial: He announced that people were to disregardany laws that would interfere with the search-and-rescue efforts going forward in the central part ofthe city. This meant formally sanctioning breakinginto and entering private stores and offices in the city.

The redefinition of property that occurs duringnatural disasters, then, almost defines looting out ofexistence. Almost, but not quite. For implicit in theredefinition is the idea that access to the redefinedproperty is limited to community members, and forcommunity ends. If outsiders enter the disaster areaand begin appropriating private property for their ownuse, it is still looting. And in fact, evidence indicates

The victim of a flood in the Southwest.

that the few verified instances of looting that do occurin natural disasters are almost always of this sort-that is, they are committed by outsiders.

Occasionally there are authenticated reports thatseem to contradict our finding that looting in naturaldisasters is very rare. One example is the looting thatoccurred during the very heavy snowstorms that para-lyzed Chicago in late January and eady February 1967.A few of the incidents reported were probably routineburglaries, but others were clearly looting. They werenot randomly distributed by location, and most of thecases occurred in the same neighborhoods-and some-times on exactly the same streets-where looting hadtaken place in the civil disturbances during the summermonths of 1966 .. Along Chicago's Roosevelt Road,for example, looting took place on some of the verysame· blocks.

This suggests that the looting that occurred in Chi-cago during the snowstorm was actually a continuation,or perhaps a resurgence, of the earlier civil disturbance ..For the general public, the habit of viewing civil dis-turbances as exclusively summer events probably ob-scured the true nature of the snowstorm looting. Butsome local policemen clearly interpreted the looting asa winter recurrence of the summer's civil disorders.

In contrast to what happens in a disaster situation,looting in civil disturbances is widespread, and the loot-

ers are usually members of the immediate community.During the past few summers, films and photographshave shown looting actually in progress. The McConeCommission reported that about 600 stores were lootedor burned in Watts. In Newark, around 1300 peoplewere arrested, mostly for taking goods. In the July 1967holocaust in Detroit, unofficial estimates were thatabout 2700 stores were ransacked.

Redefinition of Property

Disasters and civil disturbances are alike in that thenormal order and organization of the community isdisrupted. In addition, there is, in both situations, atemporary redefinition of property rights. But the twosituations differ in other respects. In a disaster, there isgeneral agreement among community members aboutcommunity goals, especially about saving lives. As aresult, by general agreement, all the resources are putat the disposal of the total community until emergencyneeds are met. A civil disturbance, on the other hand,represents conflict-not consensus-on communitygoals. The outbreak itself represents disagreement overproperty rights within the community. Access to exist-ing resources is questionable, and often there is openchallenge to prior ownership.

The critical role of attitudes toward property in de-termining the nature of looting is best seen by contrast-ing the looting that occurs in civil disturbances withthat found in disasters. There are three significant '''\->

differences. As already noted, widespread looting doeJoccur in civil disturbances, while it is infrequent indisasters. Further, the looting in civil disturbancesis selective, focusing on particular types of goods orpossessions, often symbolic of other values. And, whileout-and-out looting is strongly condemned in disastersituations, looters in civil disturbances receive, fromcertain segments of the local community, strong socialsupport for their actions.

The occurrence of looting in civil disturbances needsno further documentation. And selectivity can be seenin the fact that, in racial outbreaks, looters have concen-~trated overwhelmingly on certain kinds of stores. InWatts, Newark, and Detroit, the main businesses af-fected were groceries, supermarkets, and furniture andliquor stores. In contrast, banks, utility stations, indus-trial plants, and private residences have been generallyignored. Apartments and homes have been damaged,but only because they were in or near burned businessestablishments. Public installations such as schools andOffice of Economic Opportunity centers have also beenspared. There has not been indiscriminate looting, Cer-tain kinds of consumer goods have been almost the onlytargets.

Looters in civil disturbances are also likely to receive'"'support from many people in their community. Spiral-

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ing support coincides with shifts in property redefini-tions, and these shifts occur in three stages. Initiallooting is often a symbolic act of defiance ..The secondphase, in which more conscious and deliberate plunder-ing develops, is possibly spurred on by the presence ofdelinquent gangs that loot more from need or for profitthan for ideological reasons. Finally, in the third stage,there is widespread seizure of goods. At this point, loot-ing becomes the socially expected thing to do. Forexample, a sociological survey at U.c.L.A. found thatnearly one-fourth of the population participated in theWatts outbreak (although all of these participantsprobably did not engage in the looting)"

If looting means strictly the taking of goods, little ofit occurs in the first phase of civil disturbances, Instead,destructive attacks are most frequently directed againstsymbols of authority in the community. Police cars andfire trucks are pillaged and burned. What is involvedhere is perhaps illustrated most dearly in other kinds ofcivil disturbances, such as some of those created bycollege students. One of the authors once watched acrowd of students determinedly attack, for over anhour, an overhead traffic light. It conveniently sym-bolized the city administration and police-the actualtarget of the demonstrators' wrath. In racial civil dis-turbances, the police and their equipment are also seenas obvious symbols of the larger community towardwhich the outbreak is directed. How intense this focuscan be was shown in the Watts disturbance. About 168police cars and 100 pieces of fire-fighting equipmentwere damaged or destroyed.

The full redefinition of certain property rights occursnext. The "carnival spirit" observed in the Newark andDetroit disturbances did not represent anarchy" It repre-sented widespread social support for the new definitionof property. In this phase, there is little competition forgoods. In fact, in contrast to the stealthy looting thatoccasionally occurs in disaster situations, looting in civildisturbances is quite open and frequently collective. Thelooters often work together in pairs, as family units, orin small groups. Bystanders are frequently told aboutpotential loot. And in some instances, as in the Wattsoutbreak, looters coming out of stores hand strangersgoods as "gifts."

Looting in civil disturbances is by insiders-by localcommunity members, These looters apparently comenot only from the low socioeconomic levels and fromdelinquent gangs, but from all segments of the popula-tion. During disturbances in Toledo, 91 percent of the126 adults arrested for taking goods had jobs. A ran-dom sample in Detroit found that participants in theoutbreak came more or less equally from all incomebrackets.

In both disasters and civil disturbances, there is aredefinition of property rights within the community.

The community authorities, however, respond verydifferently to the two situations. In disasters, responsibleofficials tolerate, accept, and encourage the transitionfrom private to community property, In civil dis-turbances, community authorities see looting as essen-tially criminal behavior-as a legal problem to behandled forcefully by the police. And many segmentsof the larger community, especially middle-class people,with their almost sacred conception of private property,tend to hold the same view" This view of looting incivil disturbances fits in neatly with the ideas theyalready have about the criminal propensities of certainethnic groups, notably Negroes.

Looting as a Mass Protest

At one level, there is no question that looting in civildisturbances is criminal behavior" But the laws thatmake it so are themselves based on dominant concep-tions of property rights" Widespread looting, then, mayperhaps be interpreted as a kind of mass protest againstour dominant conceptions of property.

Mass protest is not new in history. According toGeorge Rude's analysis, in his book The Crowd inHistory, demonstrating mobs from 1730 to 1848 inEngland and France were typically composed of local,respectable, employed people rather than the pauper-ized, the unemployed, or the "rabble" of the slums.The privileged classes naturally regarded these popularagitations as criminal-as fundamentally and uncon-ditionally illegitimate .. Rude notes, however, that suchprotest effectively communicated the desires of a seg-ment of the urban population to the elite, E.]. Hobs-bawm, in his analysis of the preindustrial "city mob,"takes the same position: "The classical mob did notmerely riot as a protest, but because it expected toachieve something by its riot. It assumed that the au-thorities would be sensitive to its movements, and prob-ably also that they would make some immediate conces-sion .... This mechanism was perfectly understood byboth sides."

In current civil disturbances, a similar mechanismand a similar message may be evolving., An attackagainst property rights is not necessarily "irrational,""criminal," or "pointless" if it leads to a clearer systemof demands and responses, in which the needs andobligations of the contending parties are reasonablyclear to themselves and to one another, The scope andintensity of current attacks indicate the presence oflarge numbers of outsiders living within most Ameri-can cities. If property is seen as a shared understand-ing about the allocation of resources, and if a greaterconsensus can be reached on the proper allocation ofthese resources, many of these outsiders will becomeinsiders, with an established stake in the communitiesin which they live.

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This, then, is the most fundamental way in whichlooting in civil disturbances differs from looting afternatural disasters: The looting that has occurred in re-cent racial outbreaks is a bid for the redistribution ofproperty. It is a message that certain deprived sectorsof the population want what they consider their fairshare-and that they will resort to violence to get it,The fact that looting in riots is more widespread than indisasters, that it concentrates on the prestige items thatsymbolize the good life, and that it receives thesupport and approval of many within the deprivedsectors who do not participate themselves, merely indi-cates the true nature and intention of looting underconditions of mass protest.

The basic question now is whether American com-munity leaders can or will recognize that such looting ismore than "pointless" or "criminal" behavior, If theydo, it may mark the beginning of a new political dia-logue, in which the outsiders in our urban communitiescan express their desires nonviolently to the insiders-insiders who will have finally learned to listen. If not,then in the summers to come, and perhaps in the win-ters as well, many men and women from the growingurban population may continue to demand a redefinitionof property rights through disorder and violence.

FURTHER READING SUGGESTED BY THE AUTHORS:

Social Organization Under StreH' A Sociological Review ofDiJarter 'Studies by Allen Barton (Washington: National Academyof Sciences, 1963)" An excellent summary of research on disasterbehavior..An updated paperback edition is to be published soon,Convergeme Behavior in Disasters by Charles Fritz and JHMathewson (Washington, n.c.: National Academy of Sciences,1957) An excellent analysis of actual social control problemsin disastersThe ImpoHible Revolution? Bla,k Power and the American Dreamby Lewis Killian (New York: Random House, 1968) Aprojection into the future of current trends in civil disordersRiot.!, Violen,e and Disorder; Civil Turbuleme in UrbanCommunities edited by Louis Masotti (Beverly Hills, Calif.: SagePublications, 1968), A series of wide-ranging articles onurban disturbances

Russell Dynes (left), professor of sociology at Ohio StateUniversity, has just published a monograph on Organized Behaviorin DiJarters. As co-director of the Disaster Research Center he isdoing research on community functioning in acute anddiffuse types of crisesEL Quarantelli is also a professor of sociology at Ohio StateUniversity and co-director of the Disaster Research CenterHis current research focuses on the emergence of new groups inemergency situations, and the violation of legal norms duringdisasters,

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