I have reported on these two events in my previous investigations (you can check out my current analysis here, I refer specifically to these two events).

In essence, both in Ferguson and in Baltimore Revolutionary Communists, opportunists, and provocateurs participated in fomenting chaos and co-opting the local community for propagandist victories. These opportunists and provocateurs capitalize on the general sentiment and purposefully provoke one another so their side takes the win.

I interviewed the locals, the young & old, and their sentiment was more realistic and more pessimistic than those of the "change & hope" sloganeers. The realized that they were being used as props and they will be left by the curbside once the show was over. The young knew this too but as they saw it, there was nothing else to lose but their frustation.

The mob mentality, as you point it out, is an inherent feature of the collective conscious of the crowd: whether in a concert or in a protest the principle is the same. The individual possess the rational mind, not the crowd or the state. In my opinion, this is why OCCUPY failed because they were prioritizing how to organize the crowd INSTEAD of building localized networks of freedom-cells.

This PROBLEM. REACTION. SOLUTION. works so very well with crows because all the crowd can do is react...