Once it gets started, rioting is difficult to stop by authorities as constrained as American police forces are:
Of course authorities prepared to resort to brutality can terminate riots promptly. Buford gives the example of how the Sardinian police militia smothered a soccer riot during the 1990 World Cup matches. Hundreds of rowdy English soccer fans had flown in on chartered planes, and were determined to find trouble. The police did not try to cover every action node at once; this would have left them outnumbered everywhere. Instead, following textbook military strategy, they massed forces and surrounded first one, then another group of hooligans inglisi, rendering each in turn hors de combat by beating them senseless with truncheons. Few of the Englishmen actually had to be arrested (which would have been very time-consuming for the police). Nevertheless, because they were not allowed to innocently transpire through police lines to re-appear at some less well-defended action node, the riot soon collapsed.
USA police cultivate a culture of apparent defiance. Riots look good on TV and make it easier to lobby for bigger budgets.
USA police follow similar strategies. Rather than shoot their citizens everywhere, they serve no-knock warrants with overwhelming SWAT force, one house at a time.
But when Occupy Wall Street appeared scary for rich people, you can see that the USA police immediately received a large private bribe and then took serious measures to keep the riots far away from the actual vulnerable rich people.
Riots are show business, and the moral of the story is “the police need bigger budgets.”
It should be obvious what Smedley Butler would say.
He would say, “The war of police against rioters is a racket.”
I was in Paris in 1967 when the Jews whipped the Arabs in the Six-Day War. I was staying in a student hotel adjacent to the University of Paris. Jewish “students” began a demonstration, assembling and chanting. At this late date I don’t recall the chant but remember Israel was a part. I heard the noise and left my room and attempted to leave through the main door. The manager came up to me and prevented me from going out to see what was happening, telling me I was likely to be harmed. I went up to the second floor and watched French gendarmes utterly destroy the Jewish chanters by beating them with truncheons and their weighted capes. The next day I saw nothing of the incident in the papers.