Patterns of Looting and Property Norms: Conflict and Consensus in Community Emergencies
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Date
1968
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Disaster Research Center
Abstract
In this paper we shall attempt to do three things: (1) to contrast two rather different perspectives on massive looting behavior in community emergencies; (2) to note differences in patterns of looting in conflict and in consensus situations (i.e., between civil disturbances and natural disasters); and (3) to advance an explanation of looting in terms of changes in certain crucial group norms, particularly those pertaining to property, at times of major crises.
We shall depict some of the more easily observable characteristics of looting behavior in the last several years. and try to suggest that they can not be too easily understood in terms of being primarily symptoms of more basic individual conditions or simply a failure of persons to incorporate or maintain surrounding societal values. What is involved, from our point of view, is normative group behavior which is far more instrumental than expressive in form. We shall attempt to document this not only by looking at civil disorders but also at the pattern that looting behavior assumes in another kind of major community emergency. i.e., natural disasters. The most parsimonious common explanation f or the looting behavior in the two situations is that the usual group norms which govern property in both instances change. Because one type of these community emergencies is a consensus and the other type is a conflict situation, the resulting pattern of looting behavior is different, but nevertheless the major explanatory factor is to be found in group not in individual characteristics.
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Keywords
Looting, Civil Disturbance-General, Racial Disturbance