Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

Internet Politics said on March 12, 2009 at 12:03 am

Never trust a crowed; it can always turn on you.  The English are great in crowds but Americans are not.  I have spent time studying political crowds.

R1 said on March 24, 2009 at 7:14 pm

I actually don’t look at crowds as being deaf and dumb, I see event or facility management and promoters being such.  The crowd is simply at management mercy for providing them information and the “space” to cue so that crowd forces are managable.  Not providing information to the folk in back of the queue along with having this large queue being directed into a right angle bend in the foyer of the store along with a total lack of planning on Walmart’s part does not make a crowd deaf and dumb, it makes Walmart very dumb.

This type of “blitz” as Walmart calls it has been repeated at many Walmart’s for years and maybe Time can do a literature search and then show how many chances Walmart has had to get this right and then one will see that the crowd is not deaf and dumb.  I hope this is not the study language that Dr. Still uses.

The real crowd experts in the US are Dr. John Fruin, a recognized pedestrian engineer and Paul Wertheimer, of http://www.crowdsafe.com and the organizer of the committee that put the Who Concert Study together.  The author would be well advised to seek their advice in putting together future stories on crowd issues.

It will be interesting to see how the local and Federal safety agencies that are investigating this will view the crush on black Friday.

Freeware Downloads said on March 25, 2009 at 3:23 pm

Reminds me of the football stadium disaster in Liverpool in the 80s where crowd pressure ended up killing people. Not nice.

Amanda Ripley said on March 25, 2009 at 3:31 pm

R1, thanks for the comment. I did not mean “deaf and dumb” in the literal sense. If you read that section in context, you’ll see that I was trying to explain that crowds are not generally malicious. When crowd pressure kills someone, it is not because the crowd meant to do so--it is because they do not know what is happening in the front of the crowd. And that is because the organizers have not set up a way to communicate with the crowd.

I agree with you about the expertise of John Fruin. You may notice that I quoted him in the story.

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