What's behind 'flash mobs'?

From her 24th-floor apartment on 15th Street in Center City the night of March 20, Debi English, a retired nurse, witnessed the churn and chaos of the latest so-called flash mob and found herself yelling out into the darkness:

"What's going on, Philadelphia?"

Since then, the same question has preoccupied a weary city wrestling with the repeated spectacle of its young people running amok, lighted cell phones in hand, looking like contemporary rabble brandishing torches and terrorizing the countryside.

Overall, what has been happening here is not yet understood. City leaders and social workers are casting about for potential reasons for such unnerving behavior: Is it is the parents, the lack of school activities, poverty, the Internet?

Theories aside, what is known for certain is that teenagers met on South Street on March 20 - and in Center City on March 3, Feb. 16, and Dec. 18 - summoned via social networking.

"Come to South Street. South Street is poppin," beckoned the messages.

In each of the four incidents, violence broke out. In each, the teenagers involved were overwhelmingly African American males, although prosecutors say a significant number were girls.

"I think it's happening because these kids out there have nothing to do. It's happening out of boredom," said Marques Carson, 17, a student at Mastery Charter School in South Philadelphia. "They want to hang out and have fun, by any means necessary."

He attributed some of the violence and destructive behavior to the dynamics of large groups.

"When you're by yourself, you're one person," he said. "When you're with your friends you become another person. The peer pressure is on. . . . Too many kids are followers, not leaders."

"I think it just happens as a last-minute thing," he said of how these impromptu gatherings evolve. "Word spreads quick."

Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson, a part-time Philadelphia resident renowned for his analysis of African American culture here, is writing about the so-called flash mobs in a book to come out next year. The gatherings had a "quasi-carnival atmosphere," writes Anderson, calling them a "kind of social storm."

Many of the kids arrested in the Philadelphia incidents were from impoverished neighborhoods. A lot of them, Assistant District Attorney Angel Flores said in an interview, were having fun amid the mayhem. "They had smiles on their faces as they scared people at random," he said. "They thought that assaulting others was a form of enjoyment."

They were not on the hunt for particular victims, Flores said, although they trampled and punched people along the way - white, black, whomever - and damaged property. The biggest gathering was on South Street, where more than 2,000 people amassed, Flores said.

It would behoove us to figure it why this happened soon, said Darryl Coates, executive director of the Philadelphia Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network.

"We're going to be tested when summer comes," he said. "And we have to be sure we're ready as a city."

People have called these events flash mobs, but some say it's a misnomer, since flash mobs tend to be quirky, artistic gatherings organized on the Internet.

"I never heard of flash mobs that were violent," said Marilyn Moran, director of the Philadelphia chapter of the Social Media Club, an international group that promotes awareness of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other social media. "These were pretty much riots."

Philadelphia appears to be leading this dubious trend. It's so new that the FBI, the American Psychological Association, and the Criminal Justice Program at the Harvard Kennedy School have no experts on "flash-mob violence."