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Following the publication in 1895 of Gustav Le Bon's seminal work, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, psychological explanations of collective disorder unremittingly emphasised the supposedly anomalous and irrational nature of the phenomenon. Recently, however, this 'classical' theoretical tradition has been supplanted by increasingly enlightened social psychological and socio-political approaches which emphasise the importance to our understanding of the contexts, dynamics and underlying meanings of episodes of public disorder. This article outlines the evolution of these theoretical perspectives and notes the extent to which they appear to have induced corresponding shifts in police public order strategy.

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In the fall of 2013, the 'knockout game' -random black-on-white assaults -became the dominant storyline in the US media. Despite no measurable increase in these types of attacks, a moral panic emerged that drew from and amplified numerous previous panics around race and violent crime. While in many ways the 'knockout game' is the latest iteration of exaggerated and projected white fears of black violence in the US, the current racial formation is one that increasingly promotes the idea that white Americans are systematically subordinated. In spite of a lack of material evidence to support this claim, media outlets have played a key role in stoking racialised moral panics and normalising what had once been fringe theories of white racial victimhood -to the extent that more than half of white working-class Americans feel they are part of an oppressed racial group.