It seems more likely to have been a test. Obama now KNOWS that he can more or less induce riots on demand, and make them stop whenever he wants. Further, among those receiving food stamps, he has reinforced both by withholding, and by being excessively generous the primary role government–HIS government–plays in the lives of these people.
It has been obvious for some time that his efforts to increase the number of people receiving handouts, whether by putting record numbers of people on food stamps in the first place, giving them free phones, paying them to protest, and the like, have had as their purpose creating people who over time will be unable to conceive of life where they have to fend for themselves, and who thus can be reliably counted on to vote Democrat.
What we now also know is that they are a potential tool for the creation of the sort of chaos that normally precedes a coup. Violence in the streets is a couple keystrokes away.