Riots spread from public areas (downtown, public buildings) and looting from commercial areas and malls to neighborhoods for a few reasons: 1. Spillover: geographic expansion. The homes are close to the riot and looting, so the chaos just naturally bleeds over. Riots do not respect the boundaries between commercial, civic, and residential districts (though they often follow actual physical features). •Rioters, looters, and spectators move along streets into adjoining neighborhoods, sometimes without any particular destination. •Displacement: Police dispersal operations push crowds away from commercial districts and into surrounding residential streets. •Breaking into smaller groups that scatter rioters/looters through the surrounding area and some continue vandalizing or looting independently discovering other opportunities for theft, etc. This is particularly relevant to older urban neighborhoods where houses, apartments, storefronts, and commercial corridors are closely intermingled. A residential street one block from a looted shopping district may be exposed simply because it lies along a natural route of movement. Spillover does not necessarily mean that rioters have decided to attack residential neighborhoods. 2. Targeted. As we saw in 2020 in some cases, the neighborhoods are the destination for protests, riots, or looting to "take it to the suburbs" for political or racial reasons. This is often to make people feel unsafe in their homes to intimidate them. Pogroms often happen this way. •Affluent neighborhoods may be selected because their residents symbolize wealth, privilege, or a political and economic establishment. In this situation, the neighborhood itself becomes a symbolic target. •Individual residences may become destinations because of the occupant's public position, political activity, reputation, or association. i.e. when mobs showed up outside Tucker Carlson's house. •The crowd does not necessarily need to enter homes or destroy property to achieve its objective. 3. Nothing else to loot. Once the stores and other, richer targets are emptied, they switch to residential areas because they are largely untouched and are remaining sources of lootable value. •Residential burglary is generally different from commercial looting. A store offers concentrated merchandise; a neighborhood requires movement between individual properties. It is more personal and represents a more bold and depraved set of looters who are willing to transgress into more "respected" spaces (houses) than simply violate a public space like a store where the harm is less individualized. •The longer the breakdown of law enforcement persists, the more ordinary criminal behavior can become intertwined with the original riot. The people burglarizing homes days later may not be the same people who participated in the original disturbance. 4. The collapse of deterrence. Residential crime can expand even when commercial targets remain available, simply because the consequences of criminal activity have disappeared or gone down. •When police are overwhelmed, absent, or concentrating their resources elsewhere, offenders may conclude that residential burglary and robbery have become easier to commit without apprehension. This can be seen in a by looters targeting evacuated areas. •This is not necessarily the physical expansion of a riot, disaster, etc. but it is the expansion of lawlessness created by the event. •Crime may extend beyond property crime to personal violence simply because the chances of being caught or punished are less, empowering criminals who'd otherwise be deterred.