The snowstorm that shut down the Northeast did not shut down the mob.
In the streets of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York and in its Washington Square Park in lower Manhattan, crowds of young men assaulted police officers with snowballs.
This might sound like harmless fun. After all, that’s the point of snowball fights; they are, or often are, simply convivial if energetic confrontations between well-meaning antagonists using weapons that disintegrate on contact. They can be outlets for boisterousness from which combatants emerge sweaty, damp from their intersection with flying white stuff, and rosy-cheeked from the bracing exercise in clear, cold air. After which there awaits a reviving mug of hot chocolate.
But what happened in New York City was not fun of this sort, much though some of the assailants guffawed and delighted in the discomfiture of the officers they attacked. These snowball scenes were not broadly amusing at all, and they were not perpetrated with goodwill. The officers were followed and surrounded by what looked like hundreds, and was certainly scores of young adults, some of them masked, who were evidently out to get them.
In the video, one sees male and female officers walking swiftly away from crowds following them, intent on staying within range of well-aimed snowball throws. Missiles gathered from the plentiful icy armory lying on the sidewalks are thrown by those in the second and third ranks of pursuers over the heads of those in the front rank, and smack into the backs and heads of officers trying to distance themselves without fleeing in disorder.
In the park, officers are caught between encircling enemies and between the fight-or-flight reflex. Once or twice, officers try to chase or grab someone who has just hit them in the face or neck with an icy projectile. But the antagonists skip away into the crowd, leaving the police impotent to react.
One officer at least is clearly a little hurt, a snowball having apparently hit him squarely in an open eye. The police do not know how to react or which way to turn, so they set off first in one direction and then another. All the while, the mob is cackling and braying, glorying in the officers’ confusion and humiliation.
Confusion, humiliation, and provocation of the forces of the law are precisely what the mob wants. It wants to mock and belittle those who are in authority and what they represent. To watch them is to see the forces of lawlessness, disorder, and disrespect sampling an amuse bouche amid the feast of social upheaval and leftist agitation that is increasingly indulged in America.
The intention and consequences, though, are not minimal even if some of the participants see this latest piece of New York street theater as trivial. Some may pride themselves that they are resisting authoritarianism, but in truth, they are really smashing legitimate authority.
The consequences are great as such incidents accumulate. They contribute to the general breakdown of order and decent norms in our society. That is their intention. In the snowball melee in New York City this week, as in anti-deportation riots in Los Angeles last June and wholesale interference with law enforcement in Minneapolis this winter, the mob deliberately pushes beyond the limits of decent, legitimate, and civilized protest. The hope is not simply to express displeasure at particular policies, but to create high-stress situations and, if possible, produce such frustration and humiliated rage in their enemies, the police, that one of them will overreact. The overreaction can be caught on camera — it might be outrageous or even criminal — and can then be used to stoke public disquiet and demand for change.
It is possible to monitor police or other law enforcement actions without shoving a camera into officers’ faces. One can protest what they are doing by shouting from a distance; it is not necessary to rush up just inches away with one’s foul breath to scream insults.
Not all law enforcement officers are as well-trained as they should be or as even-tempered as would be helpful. It is inevitable that some will snap and lash out. Then the capering members of the mob have their gotcha moment. They can point at the guilty and excoriate authority and policy.
Crowds of people can be a wonderful sight. When they quietly protest genuine wrongs, they acquire a collective dignity and moral force that can change the world, and often has done so. When with one voice they sing the praises of their favored sports team, or roar their appreciation of an athletic feat, they can be stirring and uplifting in their power and their positive emotion.
But when they gather in a sort of ad hoc conspiracy against law and order; when they coalesce in a febrile mass to taunt and jeer at the representatives of good government; when they disingenuously pretend that they are having a bit of fun or merely exercising their legitimate right to protest but are in truth goading officers like medieval bear baiters, they are knowingly militating against the society in which they live and thrive.
Then, they are not a good-humored, well-intentioned, or moving throng. They are an ugly mob, and it is important for our continued civilization that we can distinguish between the two.