CROWDS AND RIOTSin the 1960s. But it has been argued that many of
these riots, such as those that occurred following
the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in
1968, were also protest riots, or at least had ele-
ments of protest associated with them (Fogelson
1971). Even though there has been some effort to
identify the conditions that lead to the designation
of elements of crowd behavior as protest (Turner
1969), it is clear that communal, commodity, and
protest riots are overlapping rather than mutually
exclusive crowd phenomena and that distinguish-
ing among them therefore involves some interpretive
discretion (Turner 1994). The same is true, as well,
with the category of issueless riots, such as the
sporting victory celebrations that sometimes take
on the flavor of property riots among some of the
celebrants. Even in the case of police riots, which
involve a loss of discipline and control among the
ranks, as occurred during the 1968 Democratic
National Convention in Chicago, there is often
debate as to whether the assaultive behavior of the
police is justified. That there is some level of
ambiguity and debate associated with categorizing
and distinguishing any crowd episode as not only a
riot, but as particular kind of riot, is not surprising
considering that all crowd episodes share various
task activities or elementary forms even when they
differ in terms of their defining task activities.
Following from these observations is a final
caveat: The task activities associated with any given
crowd episode vary in the degree to which they are
the focus of attention. Not all are equally attended
to by spectators, social control agents, or the me-
dia. Consequently, task activities can be classified
according to the amount of attention they receive.
One that is the major focus of attention and thus
provides the phenomenal basis for defining the
episode constitutes ‘‘the main task activity,’’ whereas
those subordinate to the main task activity are
‘‘subordinate or side activities.’’ The main task
activity is on center stage and typically is the focus
of media attention, as illustrated by the extensive
media coverage of property vandalism and looting
associated with commodity riots. In contrast, the
remaining task activities are sideshows, occasioned
by and often parasitic to the focal task activity.
Examples of subordinate task activity in the case of
property or communal riots, or both, include
spectating or observing, informal, unofficial at-
tempts at social control, and even the work of
the media.
Variation in Participation Units. Just as em-
pirical research on crowds has discerned consider-
able heterogeneity in behavior, so there is corre-
sponding variation in terms of participants. Some
are engaged in various task activities, some are
observing, and still others are involved in the
containment and control of the other participants
and their interactions. Indeed, most of the indi-
viduals who make up a crowd fall into one of three
categories of actors: task performers, spectators or
bystanders, and social control agents. Task per-
formers include the individuals performing both
main and subordinate tasks. In the case of an
antiwar march, for example, the main task per-
formers would include the protesting marchers,
with counterdemonstrators, peace marshals, and
the press or media constituting the subordinate
task performers.Spectators or bystanders, who constitute the
second set of actors relevant to most instances of
crowd behavior, have been differentiated into proxi-
mal and distal groupings according to proximity to
the collective encounter and the nature of their
response. Proximal spectators, who are physically
co-present and can thus monitor firsthand the
activities of task performers, have generally been
treated as relatively passive and nonessential ele-
ments of crowd behavior. However, research on a
series of victory celebrations shows that some
spectators do not merely respond passively to the
main task performance and accept the activity as
given, but can actively influence the character of
the activity as well (Snow, Zurcher, and Peters
1981). Accordingly, proximal spectators can vary
in terms of whether they are passive or animated
and aggressive. ‘‘Distal spectators’’ refer to indi-
viduals who take note of episodes of crowd behav-
ior even though they are not physically present
during the episodes themselves. Also referred to
as ‘‘bystander publics’’ (Turner and Killian 1987),
they indirectly monitor an instance of crowd be-
havior and respond to it, either favorably or unfa-
vorably, by registering their respective views with
the media and community officials. Although dis-
tal spectators may not affect the course of a single
episode of crowd behavior, they can clearly have
an impact on the career and character of a series of
interconnected crowd episodes.Social control agents, consisting primarily of
police officers and military personnel, constitute