The Madding Crowd

The riot in Vancouver following the Canucks loss to the Boston Bruins in the Stanley Cup hockey contest has turned into a sort of scientific phenomenon that social theorists are trying to figure out. For starters, this was Canada – the last place you’d expect something like that to happen.

The cops and the media struggled with whether this should be called a “riot” or not. Well, “riot” these days has a connotation of humor or enjoyment, and a lot of the participants in Vancouver who were looting stores and burning cars were actually enjoying themselves – which is really sad. It had nothing at all to do with losing the Stanley Cup. So “riot” works fine for me.

The theorists divided the crowd into three main layers. The first were the actual troublemakers; the second stood by cheering them on, and the third were spectators. Layers two and three didn’t have the cojones to actually cause trouble themselves, but they sure enjoyed watching it – and having their own pictures taken in front of scenes of mayhem on their smart phones.

There were probably fourth and fifth layers – the fourth being people who wanted to get out of the crowd and were trapped, and the fifth being the few people who tried to prevent those in the first layer from doing the damage. Some were beaten up for trying.

The Vancouver cops were adhering to a plan, apparently designed to control the crowd without confronting it -- which may be supported by police science, but generally not acceptable to the public, who would have preferred heavy tear gas and clubs swinging. Some say the city should have never invited people to go downtown to watch the hockey game on big screens. There simply weren’t enough cops, it appears, to handle those crowds. They say the city may have been lulled into a false sense of security by the success of the Olympics, crowd-wise, but then, there were 8,000 police on duty. The only good news was that there was no shooting among the crowd – they don’t do handguns in Canada.

Vancouver just happened to have a convention of travel bloggers in town during Wednesday night’s activities – whoops!

It’s my belief that social media and smart-phone technology have become the steroids fueling these events. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against these things at all. But if Facebook and Twitter can cause an Arab spring, what role did they play in Vancouver? With these modern marvels, the human race clearly has a tiger by the tail, and had better figure it out fast.