What would "seeing riots coming" look like?
Here, there was no context to the riots other than "go to plaça Catalunya and break/steal things", no political demand whatsoever, it was a totally opportunistic chaos and nothing like I've seen in France or Spain ever.
In the preceding months there had been growing unease between the police and the inhabitants of ...
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Brixton_riotWhich is pretty different to this apparent clear blue sky bolt from blue spontaneous remotely weaponised flash mob.