Word: mobbed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...mystery is always this: How does a group of otherwise normal people turn into a mob capable of this kind of savagery? One of the police officers who did the beating was described as a gentle family...
Most American police are decent men and women doing honorable service. It is partly for that reason that the transformation from group to mob, as in Los Angeles, is hard to understand. But the dangerous work that they do, for modest salaries, is also brutalizing. The American homicide rate has jumped from 5 per 100,000 population in 1960 to 9 per 100,000 in 1989. In big cities two-thirds of felony defendants have been arrested before, and about half of them had at least one prior conviction. Drug gangs are often armed with automatic weapons more lethal than...
...secret of the transformation from group to mob: a few leaders incite the rest, knotting the rope, throwing it over the limb of a tree. The others allow themselves to be carried passively by the group purpose. Lynch mobs always armor themselves with a sense of their retributive righteousness. They also mean to exert social control by exemplary doses of terror, on the conceit that violence is the only language the victim understands...
...coalition. What is surprising is that, contrary to some reports, most of Mubarak's 56 million countrymen support his stance on the war and have not fallen sway to Saddam's attempts to turn the conflict into a battle of Arab vs. West. Ordinary Egyptians show no inclination to mob the streets in support of Iraq as hundreds of thousands of other Arabs have done in cities from Amman to Nouakchott. When a small band of demonstrators assembled in Cairo two weeks ago for a march on the presidential palace, bystanders watched approvingly as police broke up the protest with...
Although the practice has died down recently, teenage judges presided over so-called people's courts that almost casually handed out death sentences to suspected traitors. A youth invention that has not disappeared is "necklacing," the method of mob execution in which a gasoline-doused rubber tire is thrown around a suspected traitor's body and set ablaze...