Following the death of a 29 year old black man killed by police in Tottenham, England and the police beating of a 16 year old girl protester, four days of riots ensued throughout many English cities in towns. This resulted in widespread looting, arson, and violence. During these four days 5 civilians were dead and 186 police officers were injured. At a quick glance one may assume that all who partook in the riots were rebels in terms of their mode of adaptation to anomie. Sociological hermeneutics reveals to me that the crowd of rioters were comprised of ritualists, innovators, and rebels.
Many rioters are simply just opportunists who seek to exploit this less than once in a lifetime contingency. Prior to the riots they may have been conformists working a 9-5 with no criminal record living a typical middle-class lifestyle. Or they may have been innovators working all types of hours selling drugs in order to maintain themselves and their family. The riots provided a temporary means for normally law-abiding citizens to become deviants taking advantage of the circumstances or to express their frustration of being oppressed by the police. Either way the majority of protesters were not rebels by nature that had the intention of altering or destroying the social institutions that have left them alienated. During those four days, many protesters may have acquired traits of a rebel but I would argue that they were not deep seeded rebels prior to August 6, 2011. Many returned to their life as a conformist or innovator after the riots subsided. Though it is possible to they could have been converted into rebels during that four day period and began a lifestyle as one thereafter.
I believe mob mentality, is the fundamental factor for the growth of numbers in rioters and for the havoc that results. This clip is of the Sublime song April 26, 1992. This song portrays an exceptionally parallel situation of the Rodney King riots that erupted after police were acquitted of the vicious beating of an unarmed black man that was captured on video.
The songs describes that his experience in the 1992 riots was not about Rodney King but the fact that the tables temporarily turned and “the people” were in control. He used these riots as an excuse to loot and burn liquor and furniture stores. People get caught up in the hype of the excitement that may never happen again so they become part of the mob and act as one.
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SOC 331: Foundations of Sociological Theory 
Excellent analysis, D. It’s informed by a subtle but critical aspect of Merton’s theory: that the different categories refer to “role adjustments in specific situations, not to personality in toto” (676). Persons may shift from one to another as they engage in different social activities.
Your post also raises the question of how we classify and label different kinds of collective action: “riot” or “insurrection”? As you note, empirically what happens in situations like this is that the influence of the collective you are acting with tends to overcome rational calculation based on individual self-interest — people come to think and act collectively. But what someone calls “mob mentality,” Durkheim might call “collective effervescence.” Specialists in collective behavior and social movements point to how labels like “mob” — underpinned by the assumption that ordinary people, when they gather together, tend to become unruly and irrational — serve to delegitimize collective popular action. The British historian, EP Thompson, who pioneered “history from below” provided a seminal critique in his work on 18th century “food riots” in England. He argued that it was the “defense of liberty” that fueled the riots and gave them a moral legitimacy. Here’s a good summary: http://territorialmasquerades.net/moral-economy-of-the-crowd/
And the LA riots offer an excellent comparison with the 2011 UK riots — thanks for linking to the video. The LA/UK comparison would be particularly useful for studying the effects of technology, the new tools to which both citizens and the state have access. When I watched the video I was struck by how little we actually saw of the events, in comparison with the events in England, which I believe leads the world in terms of street surveillance, with the most CCTV cameras per territory. Of course, in the UK participants were doing plenty of filming of their own. These videos and especially Blackberry text communication served to get people on the street. Then again, they didn’t seem to be necessary in the LA case.