Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit

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.

We hear the same justifications now that we heard then—that the riots are symptoms of some other problem. Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, for example, blamed not the rioters but ICE, insisting that “if immigration raids had not happened here, we would not have” rioting. California governor Gavin Newsom, one eye doubtless on 2028, has pinned the blame on Donald Trump—as though the president’s enforcement action incited the disorder.

This style of riot apologetics is hardly new. It was familiar, in fact, to Americans circa 1968, when another “long, hot summer” engulfed the nation’s cities. It was familiar, too, to Harvard political scientist Edward C. Banfield, who dedicated a chapter of his 1970 book The Unheavenly City, an analysis of urban dysfunction, to rebutting it. His provocative explanation of why people riot—“mainly for fun and profit”—provoked outrage then. But it remains insightful and tells us something about today’s disorder.

Banfield is today inadequately remembered, the best efforts of City Journal contributors notwithstanding. But he was the source of tremendous consternation—and the target of one of the first campus cancellations—largely due to The Unheavenly City. In the book, Banfield argued that most urban problems were either the result of otherwise-desirable growth or the fault of an urban lower class with limited self-control—in either case, problems that meliorist liberalism was ill-suited to addressing.

The book’s most controversial chapter, though, runs under the aforementioned title “Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit.” In it, Banfield examined the ghetto riots that rocked major cities for much of the late 1960s, helping, among other things, to install Richard Nixon in the White House.

Much as they do today, liberals back then attributed the disorder to “root causes,” specifically the racism and poverty experienced by black participants. “On this view,” Banfield wrote, “the way to end the rioting—the only way to end it—is to stop mistreating the Negro and, so far as possible, to repair the damage already done him.” This was the view advanced by figures like New York mayor John Lindsay, who blamed the 1967 Harlem riot on “general conditions,” and advocated a program of welfare and investment in response.

But while those who riot may live in poverty or be victims of racism, that does not mean that the rioting happens because of those factors. “The possibility of a riot,” Banfield wrote, “exists wherever there are crowds of people.” Poor people riot, but so do sports fans and bored teens. Any analysis that tries to explain rioting by reference to socioeconomic factors will fail to account for much civil disorder.

Rather, a host of factors determines whether riots occur. The number of young men in a community is one important factor, Banfield argued, as is the availability of diverting institutions like school and work that help control otherwise riot-prone individuals. He also blamed the rise of television news, which allowed rioters to coordinate by showing where unrest was happening, and the criminal justice system’s lenience—especially toward minors.

Not all, or even most, riots are righteous expressions of outrage at injustice. Banfield offered a typology of riots: the “rampage,” the “foray for pillage,” the “outburst of righteous indignation,” and the “demonstration.” He argued that many of the riots plaguing the country were not primarily responses to material deprivation—which was, in fact, improving in many inner cities—but rather opportunistic outbursts in which participants used an inciting incident as a pretext to loot or destroy.

While one can dispute these claims, it is certainly the case that many modern rioters are not expressing righteous anger. Many seem simply to enjoy breaking things (like the Waymo autonomous vehicles torched in L.A.) or taking things (see the looting of Apple stores).

But Banfield’s cleverest insights go beyond external causes to observe that riots are self-perpetuating, and that defending them can paradoxically reinforce them. Rioting teaches the possibility of more rioting: “Learning through experience that an infraction can be done leads, by an illogic characteristic of childish thought, to the conclusion that it may be done,” as Banfield put it. And rioting in one place authorizes it in another—“‘If they can do it in Detroit, we can do it here,” Milwaukee teen-agers cried as they began smashing store windows.”

Similarly, attempts to explain the causes of riots simultaneously enables them. If deprivation causes rioting, and if you live in deprivation, then why not riot? Predicting that riots will happen in the absence of reform—as civil rights leaders sometimes did—further provides a justification for rioting in the absence of such reform.

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.

How does this apply to Los Angeles? If one considers today’s riots the necessary consequence of immigration enforcement, then it is easy to argue that reducing immigration enforcement will reduce riots. The Banfield view would be the opposite: if you reduce immigration enforcement in response to rioting, it will send the message that rioting works, yielding more, rather than fewer, riots.

Apologies for rioting, no matter how tepid, enable rioting as a political tool. Only refusing to negotiate with rioters can adequately deter them.

It remains to be seen what this summer holds for American cities. But the deciding factor won’t be President Trump’s continued enforcement of immigration law, in line with his electoral mandate. It will be whether local, state, and federal leaders heed Edward Banfield’s warnings and take the riots seriously—or continue to justify them.

Top Photo by Jim Vondruska/Getty Images