Anecdotal, but in my country there's been large scale protests that proceeded peacefully because the police didn't step in to antagonize the people, even if they were in their rights to do so because of the coronavirus measures.

How about picking up a history book.

In 1773, King George was upping taxes while not providing adequate representation. Colonists thought this was an abuse of power, so they robbed and looted a huge boat filled with tea, which set off events that led to the American Revolution. Look it up, I'm sure there's a wikipedia article or something, it's pretty famous event in history.

Good call. This would be the second part to study 'how riots escalate to revolution'. First things first; from demonstration to riots. Which book and author would you suggest? (Wiki, I've already read and it had little about the actual mechanism.

They did not rob or loot. They destroyed the tea, and only the tea, which belonged to the East India Company, a defacto arm of the UK government. They did not steal any tea. They did not break anything else.

So, if I just go into a store that sells Armani suits or something, and destroy the suits, but I don't take them.. that's okay. Correct?

Edit, are you also insinuating that's the only 'rioting' they did and then magically the USA just formed out of nothing?

I'm not insinuating anything, or making any value judgements on what is "okay". I'm correcting the record. "Looting" is stealing. They did not loot.

This is HN. You don't need to project motivations on people when pedantry is sufficient.

(Your Armani analogy doesn't work however - a better analogy would be destroying property owned by, say, Halliburton.)

I haven't done as much reading on the subject as I'd like, but I thought "Policing as a causal factor" by Axel Klien (2011) to be interesting. The basic idea was that underlying societal issues are necessary, but the actual civil unrest is usually precipitated by a specific case of police over reach