Are Violent 'Flash Mobs' Really a Trend?

As temperatures rose this summer, a particularly disturbing type of violence reached a boiling point in the downtowns and wealthier neighborhoods of American cities like Chicago and Washington, D.C. and, in particular, Philadelphia. The attacks were not like the riots that rocked English cities in early August. The media dubbed them “flash mobs” because the young, predominately black participants often used social media and text messages to coordinate the rapid-fire assaults, muggings, and en masse collective shoplifting sprees, much to the chagrin of the tech-savvy performance artists who coined the term.

Though collective violence is nothing new, the technology used to organize it is, and so is, to a lesser extent, the fact that the victims were walking through wealthier and whiter neighborhoods. One Philadelphia victim ended up in the hospital with broken teeth and his jaw wired shut, and another, a 27-year old arts journalist, was beaten so badly that her leg broke. In Chicago, more than a dozen young men beat a 34-year-old after dragging him off of his scooter on the city’s North Side. And in January in Washington, D.C., months before that city’s typical summer crime spike, a group of young teenagers attacked a random man on a subway platform while several others stood by filming it on their cell phones.