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37 Int. J. Offender Therapy & Comp. Criminology 1 (1993)

handle is hein.journals/ijotcc37 and id is 1 raw text is: Associate Editor's Editorial Urban Violence in Historical Perspective Leon D. Hankoff It became dangerous to wear any gold buttons or girdles, or to appear at a late hour in the streets of a peaceful capital (Gibbon, 1845, p. 57). With these words Edward Gibbon described sixth-century Constantinople when two contending factions regularly attacked each other and passersby in the city for little apparent reason. The blues and greens, as the factions were known, based their origins on colors used by athletic contestants in the hippodrome. The contending factions elaborated differences in dress and manner and regularly engaged in violent exchanges. On one festive occasion, producing concealed weapons the greens slaughtered 3,000 blues. I offer this unlikely example as my introduction to the question of group violence in our time of increased urban danger. The example is instructive in that it highlights the factor of group solidarity in our efforts to understand the riots and rampages that have marked 20th-century cities. The Los Angeles riots of 1992 threatened to ignite a chain reaction throughout the United States. The obvious elements in the Los Angeles riots were the presence of a large disadvantaged community and the provocation of a perceived miscarriage of justice against that community. The riots of Watts in 1965 and Newark in 1967-68 were similarly viewed. It is necessary, of course, to go beyond these headline issues of deprivation and injustice and understand the full anatomy of group violence in the 20th century. We must distinguish between the ostensible immediate inciting causes and root causes of a more continuing nature. As the example of Constantinople suggests, material deprivation is less central than some form of pervasive group assertion. In our own time we have seen rampages by the attendees at rock concerts and sports events. A recent study of soccer fan behavior portrays their often lethal behavior as a sport of its own, providing a euphoric group experience for English hooligans (Buford, 1992.) Following a Saturday game these working class men regularly seek the thrill of punching, stabbing, gouging, and crushing any human target to be found. In their 1985 assault in Brussels, 39 soccer from the ,aie o J o sOff er hlray nd Comparative Criminology, 37(1), 1993

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