How to Prepare Your Family for Civil Unrest

During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, grocery stores in South Central closed within hours of the first night of unrest. ATMs in affected neighborhoods ran dry. Emergency calls went unanswered for days across the heaviest areas. The National Guard did not reach full operational strength until the third day. By that point, families who had not prepared ahead of time were managing a week-long disruption with whatever happened to be in the house.

The same pattern held in 2020. More than 140 US cities imposed curfews within 72 hours of the Minneapolis unrest beginning. Businesses across those cities closed or cut hours without warning. Pharmacies were among the first to restrict access. The disruption reached households that were nowhere near the conflict itself.

The pattern is consistent: it is not the conflict itself that affects most families. It is the second-order effects. Stores that close preemptively. Supply chains that pause. Banking access that locks up. Emergency services that redirect toward conflict zones. Those effects arrive faster than most households expect, and they last longer.

What Civil Unrest Actually Disrupts — and How Fast

The sequence is predictable. Unrest concentrates in a geographic area. Businesses in that area, and in a larger buffer zone around it, close as a precaution. That includes grocery stores, pharmacies, and gas stations. Emergency services get redirected toward the source of the conflict. Cell networks in the affected area degrade from volume. Then curfews extend the closures and restrict movement for everyone — including people well outside the conflict zone.

The families most affected are not the ones in the middle of it. They are the ones who ran low on food the week before, whose prescriptions needed refilling, whose cash reserve was $40 in a wallet. The disruption finds the gaps that were already there.

The good news is that civil unrest is among the more foreseeable emergencies. Tensions escalate over days or weeks before situations reach a boiling point. There is usually a window. The question is whether you use it.

Cash and Financial Access

Banks and ATMs stop working reliably during concentrated unrest. During the 2020 protests, multiple Chase and Wells Fargo branches in Minneapolis and Atlanta closed for several consecutive days. ATMs in those areas were shut down as a security measure or were vandalized. The same pattern played out in 1992, and in the UK during the 2011 London riots.

If your household runs primarily on card transactions, the gap between "things are fine" and "I cannot buy anything" can be a single afternoon. A closed branch, a drained ATM, and a store that stopped accepting cards due to network issues are all common during sustained unrest. They often happen simultaneously.

The guide recommends keeping a cash reserve of $500 to $1,000 per household, stored at home and accessible within one minute. The calculation is simple: enough to cover food, fuel, and medication for a week without touching a bank or using a card. Most families who have not done this find the number more manageable than they expected once they actually price it out.

Building the reserve gradually works. Adding $50 to $100 in cash per paycheck until you reach the target is more sustainable than one large withdrawal. The important thing is that the money lives at home — not in a bank account that requires infrastructure to access.

Home Shelter-in-Place Basics

For most families in most civil unrest situations, staying home is the right call. Going out into an area under curfew creates legal exposure and physical risk. The question is whether your home is actually set up to support that decision for several consecutive days.

The minimum threshold is specific: 72 hours of food and water per person, medications current and not about to run out, and a working way to receive information that does not depend on cell networks. Below that threshold, shelter-in-place is aspirational rather than real. The household will need to go out before the situation is over.

Information and Communication When Networks Are Unreliable

Cell networks degrade during concentrated civil unrest because usage spikes sharply in a limited area and towers get overwhelmed. During the 2020 Minneapolis unrest, several major carriers reported degraded service in the metro area during peak days. Texts sometimes went through when calls did not. Neither was reliable.

Two things work when cell does not. A battery-powered or hand-crank NOAA radio picks up emergency broadcasts without any network dependency. A pre-agreed check-in protocol with family members outside the immediate area — "if I have not contacted you by 6pm, here is what to do" — removes the need for real-time communication during windows of service outage.

The most overlooked communication preparation has nothing to do with devices. It is a written contact list with physical addresses, kept in the house rather than only in a phone. If your phone is dead or unavailable, the contacts in it are inaccessible. A printed list of the ten most important contacts — family members, a neighbor you trust, a doctor, your employer's main line — costs nothing and solves a real problem.

Your Family's Trigger Criteria — When to Act, Not Just Watch

The hardest part of managing civil unrest as a family is not logistics. It is timing. Most households underestimate how quickly situations escalate and delay making a decision until the easy options are already gone. The window between "this is starting to look serious" and "I wish we had acted two days ago" is often measured in hours.

Trigger criteria are a set of pre-agreed conditions that tell your household: when this happens, we do that. They are written down, agreed upon when nothing is happening, and not subject to negotiation in the moment when emotions are running high and information is incomplete.

The specific thresholds depend on your household's situation — your geography, your family's mobility, your work obligations — but the structure is consistent. A condition, then an action, stated plainly. "If there is a curfew within five miles of our home, no one leaves for non-emergency reasons." "If the interstate is closed, we take this alternate route to this meeting point." "If we have not heard from each other by this time, here is the default assumption."

The guide's planning chapter walks through how to build a trigger criteria framework specific to your household, including the questions that most families forget to answer until they need them.

The One Week Before vs. the Night Before

Civil unrest usually escalates over days before it peaks. That means there is often a window when you have warning and the ability to act. How you use that window matters as much as whether you use it.

When the situation is escalating and you have time, the priority order is: cash first, then food and water to the 72-hour threshold per person, then medications, then fuel. In that sequence, for a specific reason. Fuel lines form fast during perceived emergencies and gas stations are frequent targets during unrest. Cash and food are easier to acquire quietly and early. Starting with fuel is a common mistake that costs time and sometimes puts people in proximity to the conflict before they need to be.

The night-before situation — meaning unrest has reached curfew and you are sheltering in place — calls for a different set of actions. The priority becomes information, communication, and an honest inventory of what you have. Locate the first aid kit. Confirm your communication plan with anyone outside the household. Keep phones on a charger. Write down anything time-sensitive: medication schedules, upcoming appointments that may need rescheduling, contacts you may need to reach.

Families that confuse the week-before and night-before situations tend to skip the week-before work entirely — either because they are waiting to see how bad it gets, or because the night-before urgency makes better sense as a mental model. The week-before is less dramatic. It is also where most of the leverage is.

The Starting Point

Look at what your household currently has: cash on hand, days of food and water, medication supply. Write down where each falls short against the 72-hour threshold. That list — not a general resolution to get more prepared, but a specific inventory of actual gaps — is the starting point. Work through it in priority order, one item at a time, before anything is happening.