Carried Away

Looting Has Its Roots in the Chaos Of Catastrophe

We fear the anarchy, the feral fanaticism and, at the heart of it, the primeval bugbear of someone coming after our homes, our stores, our stuff.

To follow the news on television the past couple of days, looters have pretty much taken over the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "The fear, of course," said talk show host Tucker Carlson, who is less breathy and sensationalist than most, "is that looting contributes to the sense that things are out of control, and that lawlessness begins to snowball, and that stealing becomes murder."

It's among the scariest and nastiest of nightmares. One person breaks a store window, others seem to gain courage and storm the establishment. In the popular mind, we are watching mob psychology in dangerous action.

But, as we are also learning from the post-Katrina chaos, what we think of as looting may be more complicated than it seems.

Benigno E. Aguirre of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware has been watching and reading about looters in Louisiana. "It may look from the outside as if they are stealing or breaking the law," says Aguirre, "when in fact some of them are trying to survive."

On the other hand, he says, some of the thieves are garden-variety crooks. "There is always a very small number of people that are predisposed to crime, and they see a disaster as an opportunity to act."

There are the disenfranchised who jump at the chance to get even with those who have more stuff than they do. "Disasters can become opportunity for class warfare, and that kind of appropriation of other people's property should be prosecuted," he says,

There are looters, he says, but "people use the concept of looting without making distinctions."

Many may be people taking drastic measures required by drastic times. And some, he says, are the in-an-emergency equivalent of hunters/gatherers, foraging for food, fresh water, medicine, matches, batteries, everyday essentials that are just not available. Not at home, not at shelters.

Aguirre, who lived in New Orleans while in graduate school at Tulane, has been studying for more than 30 years the ways people respond to disaster and tragedy -- after hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes and urban riots.

The images are played on TV over and over: Windows are smashed. Huge dudes muscle into an abandoned store and hustle out with stolen TVs and boomboxes. Women hoist unwieldy packs of diapers and cartons of baby formula. Run-amok hooligans snatch up jewelry and electronic gizmos. Other things are stolen: shopping carts of soda pops and snack foods, clothing, bicycles. There are survivors, scavengers and criminal looters, and it's hard to tell the difference.

The idea of looting is often associated in the public mind with "all kinds of other subsidiary concepts," according to Aguirre. He does not believe that what we are seeing in New Orleans is the result of a "crowd mind" or "behavioral contagion."