Groups, Crowds, and Mobs

Beat Intro
Voiceover
00:00	This is the Beat – a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation.

 Interview
TeNeane Bradford
00:09	Hello! My name is TeNeane Bradford and on behalf of the COPS Office I’d like to introduce to you Steven Crimando. Mr. Crimando is a principal in Behavioral Science Applications, a New York City based consulting firm serving a global client base. He is an internationally recognized subject matter expert and educator in the behavioral aspects of homeland security, violence prevention, and disaster response. Mr. Crimando is here to talk with us today about the dynamics of groups, crowds, and mobs, as well as officer safety during citizen events. What should law enforcement know about group, crowd, and mob behavior to understand the dynamics of each?

Steven Crimando
00:44	I guess the very first point is that there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach to handling groups, crowds, and mobs. In fact, as I often discuss, groups, crowds, and mobs are very different sorts of collections of people. They’re each different in their size and their behavior and their attitude. Really, the officer and the officer’s leadership needs to be very aware of the differences between groups, crowds, and mobs, the different types of groups, crowds, and mobs, and plan their countermeasures and plan their tactics very much according to what type of group, crowd, or mob is in place.

	What we see is if the officer and their leadership do not have accurate behavioral assumptions underlying their planning and their response, it’s very likely that they overreact or underreact to the group, crowd, or mob, and in fact may be the accelerant that escalates the situation.

TeNeane
01:36	Can you speak to the psychology of crowd and mob behavior and the dangers officers face when policing crowds and mobs? 

Steven
03:38	Well, there’s two different dangers, really, inherently. Very often I speak about the physics of crowds but also the psychology of crowds. On the psychological side of the equation, we talk about a very fundamental principle in the behavioral sciences. In fact it’s known as Lewin’s equation. Dr. Kurt Lewin had said that behavior is a function of both the person and the environment. Now we can’t hope to know the thousands or tens of thousands, sometimes even more, people, the individual personalities of all those in a group, crowd, or mob, but we can predict with some accuracy what sort of environment, if it’s a group, crowd, or mob and what sort of group, crowd, or mob, are likely to create different behaviors, some of them which may become dangerous to the citizens involved, to bystanders, and certainly to officers who are trying to apply some sort of management to the situation.

	The danger to officers comes from two directions. One is a behavioral impact when crowds either come to the environment already charged with anger, hostility, aggression. Some, for example, is the anarchist groups often insert themselves in different protests, come with an agenda that likely will involve aggression and violence. There are other situations in which a peaceful protest can flash over and instantly become dangerous if the crowd perceives that something’s gone on, maybe a shots-fired situation, and they need to get out in a big hurry.

Lastly, I often speak about the physics of crowds. When there’s just so many people, the sheer force, the sheer physical forces of so many folks all together can actually have a crushing effect and become a danger as well.

TeNeane
03:19	In many of your trainings on this topic, you describe the physics of crowds and mobs. Can you describe for us what that means?

Steven
03:26	I guess I’ll start with the end of that discussion and work backwards. The end is that most often when people do get hurt and those situations in which people actually get killed in large group and crowd scenarios, it is not necessarily being trampled, or stampeded, or assaulted. Most people in those scenarios die by what we call “crowd crush.” Crowd crush is compressional asphyxiation. It means that people are so tightly packed together that as the crowd surges, as the crowd moves, as the crowd pushes, that people can no longer breathe fully, can no longer move fully. It starts to compromise their ability to respirate, to breathe fully. Within 30 seconds they can actually be unconscious and within 6 minutes they can be dead. 

What we know is most people who die in those sorts of crowds—and these can be large religious events, sporting events, entertainment events, and protests as well—they actually die standing up. They die on their feet. They’re carried by the crowd. Then at some point as the crowd loosens, individuals will drop. It will seem, upon initial investigation, that they’ve been trampled, stampede, and so forth, but upon closer autopsy what we learn is that most people actually do die standing up and it’s from that force, that crowd crush. The physics of crowds, just the weight and the mass of so many people in the same space, moving in the same direction, sometimes moving against each other, actually from a physics standpoint can create a lethal situation.

TeNeane
04:56	Now that you’ve outlined how groups, crowds, and mobs work, can you describe ways in which law enforcement officers can protect themselves while also protecting the citizens they serve?

Steven
05:07	Well, like everything else that’s done in law enforcement, the idea of protecting needs to start way before we actually engage a group, crowd, or mob. It starts in our practice, in our drills and exercises. At the foundation of that, it’s important to remember that practice doesn’t make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect. If we’re rehearsing behavior in a way that’s not accurate and not effective, that’s probably what we’re going to do in a real-life situation thrown into a group, crowd, or mob scenario. It’s important, at the basic level, that policies, plans—and specifically exercises—be based on accurate behavioral assumptions and then modeled in exercises so that officers can actually learn the difference in how to intervene, how to effectively operate, in these different environments. As I said earlier, if they underreact, it represents a danger for all. If they overreact, it potentially escalates, ignites the situation and can represent a danger for all in that environment as well.

	So the safety begins long before actually engaging a group, crowd, or mob. Then, of course, on the day of the event, being able to monitor crowds, being able to keep our finger on the pulse of that crowd to see if the dynamics, the attitude, the energy, the anger, perhaps, is changing in a way that says we’re reaching a flash point, which is what we refer to as that tipping point when a group or crowd can become a dangerous mob.

	Lastly, for all involved—officers and any sort of tactical operator, tactical EMS, and others as well—if we’re going to be in a crowd environment, it’s important to be briefed and knowledgeable about crowd safety and crowd survival tactics: what to do if we’re knocked off our feet, how to get up, how to get out of that surging crowd. I’ll give you just one very quick idea that wouldn’t dawn on most people. The same way of getting out of a hostile or angry surging crowd is the way that one would get out of a riptide if swimming at the beach. That’s to make sure you’re going across the crowd diagonally, not fighting against it and not letting the crowd take them, and in this way they slowly work to the outside edges diagonally until they get free of that physical force and they can pop out. They should understand if they’re knocked to the ground, how to get up. Even if they can’t get up, to keep crawling in the direction of the crowd until they can. A lot of crowd safety and survival is a little bit counterintuitive. Unless officers and others are briefed in it, hopefully trained in it and then practiced in it, a lot of it would not necessarily come naturally. Just like any other skill that you would hope the officer uses during a real-life situation, it’s something that has to be practiced and that muscle memory has to become automatic. With all that energy, with the fear, the stress of the situation, as I said, it’s not an intuitive response and it’s not likely just to come back from memory.
TeNeane
07:57	You’ve given a lot of critical information that is important for people to know. Where can listeners find more information on how to promote officer and citizen safety during crowd and mob events?

Steven
08:09	There’s a few good sources. You have to remember that group, crowds, or mobs come out of many different environments, from sporting events to shopping events to all sorts of things, protests included. One of the most robust academic sources is an online journal. It’s the Journal of Crowd Safety and Security Management. It’s published a few times a year at no cost and all the archives or back issues are available online as well. It’s an international journal. Academics and practitioners who specialize in crowd behavior contribute a lot of very well structured peer-reviewed articles. So that represents the science of this discussion.

	On the practice end, there’s very good information from the National Retail Federation on their website, just at the end of 2011, [they] published some very good guidelines for retailers and how to anticipate group, crowd, and mob situations in shopping mall scenarios. It also went into a very good discussion of things like flash mobs and flash robs. That also has broader applicability than just a shopping environment. There’s the National Center for Spectator Sport Safety and Security, which is a great national resource. It does a lot of publishing and training and actually an annual conference. As you would imply from the name, their main focus is on sporting events but a lot of the human behavior we see in groups, crowds, and mobs in sporting events translates to protests, to rock concerts, to shopping events, and so forth. Lastly, OSHA itself actually has some very good guidelines in crowd management safety for retailers, again, but as I mentioned, a lot of that can be broadened to other settings.

TeNeane
09:47	Thank you so much for providing us with your expertise, and your time, and a lot of good information. I’m looking forward to the next conversation with you.

Steven
09:53	Well thank you.

Beat Exit
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Disclaimer:
10:12	The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or polices of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. Department of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.


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