We have all seen the images this past week. They have become a far too common sight in America’s largest cities: cars ablaze, small businesses looted and vandalized, city centers held hostage by violent mobs, all while local law enforcement stands idly by.

President Trump took decisive action to protect the public from lawless rioters by activating the National Guard, but many of the rioters continue to engage in blatant criminality, correctly guessing they face only a remote risk of prosecution. Congress and state legislatures, however, can step in by making it ruinously expensive to riot.

For decades, the federal government has used private litigation as a tool to further public policy objectives. Disabled Americans can sue businesses for violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Consumers who suffer even the most trivial losses from deceptive advertising can bring class actions against manufacturers. Litigation is expensive, often ruinously so, and the government therefore outsources much of its law enforcement to private citizens, armed with statutes that award attorneys’ fees and civil penalties.

Rioting is first and foremost a criminal matter, and local police departments and district attorneys should quell riots through vigorous, evenhanded enforcement of criminal law. But they do not. Congress should thus fill this void by creating a private right of action, that is, the ability to bring a lawsuit against individuals who create disruptions in the form of riots.

The first step would be to define a riot, taking care to draw a clear line between criminality and First Amendment activity. Fortunately, the law already makes this distinction: expressing one’s thoughts using signs or chants is legal, but trespassing, assault, and vandalism are not. A riot should therefore be defined as a gathering of two or more people who are present in a location where they lack legal permission to be (whether private property or public property without a required permit) who engage in or aid and abet trespass, assault, and vandalism that results in property damage and obstructed rights of way. If Congress is the body passing the law, it can add a requirement that the riot affects interstate commerce (a very broad and easily satisfied requirement) to ensure the law is upheld.

The second step would be to identify the parties who can bring suit under this law. Riots result in many kinds of harm. Workers are unable to make it to work on time. Business owners contend with shattered windows, stolen inventory, and lost revenue when law-abiding residents stay home. Parents are unable to take their children to school. Police officers are assaulted. The law must recognize each of these harms by allowing anyone who suffers a harm to their person or property to bring suit.

The third step would be to craft a remedy that gives the law teeth. A challenge with enforcing criminal rioting laws is the difficulty of determining precisely which member of a riot committed which act of criminality. Civil law need not be so exacting. A participant in a riot — or those who provided material support to rioters (the deep-pocketed unions and nonprofits who help organize the protests that quickly become riots) — should face civil liability for harm that occurred during the riot. While some victims face tremendous financial harm, like a small business owner whose shop or restaurant is looted, others face smaller, harder-to-quantify harms. Plaintiffs should therefore be able to recover not only their actual damages, but a civil penalty in the tens of thousands of dollars, sufficient to deter rioters. Like almost all civil enforcement statutes, there should be a mandatory award of attorney’s fees to prevailing plaintiffs to ensure that anti-rioting cases are financially viable for attorneys.

The coddling of rioters by state and local authorities has caused tremendous destruction in American cities. In the past five years, we have seen riots ostensibly related to policing, race relations, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and, now, the enforcement of immigration laws. As long as rioters know they can act with impunity, the riots will continue. A law that makes funding or participating in riots financially devastating will make many rioters—and those who fund them—think twice before blocking a bridge or smashing a storefront window.

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Jesse Franklin-Murdock is counsel at Dhillon Law Group Inc. and he is also a resident of San Francisco, where violent riots have taken place over the course of the last week.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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