Violence, like alcohol use, seems to go down better with friends. The need for approval among most violent actors lends itself to tribally identified groups being more likely to commit violence than individuals not identified with an aggressive organization. The most violent organization in any American city is the police department. Police departments are typically more violent in cities that are pro police, and become less violent when the population turns against them, such as recently happened in Baltimore.

We humans are social animals so it is no accident that we seek approval in our riskiest of actions, combat.

In the account below, notice how important the sense of justification and of being wronged was in the generation of the attack.

#38-02 & 03: night, minutes, first-person

“This was on Highway Fifty-Five outside of Chicago. There was five of us. We weren’t all [Latin] Kings. There was Tocco, the Mexican boxer, me (Raphael), Tone, and two other Kings. We were cruising along and these four white boys speed by and throw a can of beer at us. Tone had to swerve—could have killed us. So we chased these guys for twenty miles. They obviously forgot about us, or thought they lost us, because they pulled into this parking lot behind this apartment building and kept drinking.

“We pulled up on the street above them and came down the hill. We had a tire-iron, crow bar, bricks and a cinder block. We attacked from all sides: the block shattered the windshield; Tocco went through the driver’s side window with the crow bar and used it to drag the guy out. I shattered the passenger’s side window into the guy’s face, opened the door, and pulled him out of the car. The others used bricks to break the windows. We stomped the two that we dragged out. The other two screamed—it was terrible—and cowered. The passenger had thrown the beer can. We let him and the driver lay and took the keys and ditched them.”