Police actions may have directly caused the first riot. I'm talking about the decision to discontinue bus service, shut down the Metro station and detain teenag

Police actions may have directly caused the first riot. I'm talking about the decision to discontinue bus service, shut down the Metro station and detain teenagers in the streets while police faced off with them in riot gear. It's not clear that police had any plan other than "respond to the riot", as if it was an inevitable event even before the riot existed (even though threats of a "purge" existed). How did they expect the kids to get home from school after police denied them access to every available form of transportation? It appears that police actually compounded their problem by confining all of the students into a large crowd, (and we know a few things about how crowds/herds behave). According to the Wiki it apparently took a half-hour before someone threw a brick at police, who shortly began throwing bricks themselves. Also, as far as I can tell, most of the vandalism in Baltimore was initially directed at the government (not that it's an excuse). It got out of hand and unfortunately once the real jerks got involved turned into a spate of blacks vs everyone else racism/vandalism/violence/etc, but again it was a tiny fraction of the people involved in protesting. It's not even clear that the ones primarily responsible for the vandalism/violence were even involved in the protesting. What is clear though is that many of the protesters were among those harmed in the violence, and were also in the much larger groups of people who helped clean up the mess.