A specialist in crowd control says certain factors, such as social mix and available space, can help predict human behavior.
By BILL DURYEA
Published September 18, 2003
[Times photo: Lara Cerri]
“Money Man” Kevin Shelton salutes the crowd shortly before letting thousands of dollars fly at BayWalk in St. Petersburg on Saturday
Twelve people were injured at BayWalk Saturday when Kevin Shelton, a 34-year-old real estate investor who calls himself "the Money Man," tossed $10,000 in small bills from a balcony to a crowd of 500 in a courtyard below. In the scramble for the fluttering $2 bills people were knocked to the ground, including one 14-year-old girl, and two people may have suffered broken bones. The St. Peterburg Times called Jurg W. Mattman, a former U.S. Secret Service agent and now an expert in crowd control, to learn more about the madness of crowds and the simple ways that event organizers can ensure that we remain the polite people our mothers raised.
Times: Was this something the organizers could have foreseen? Was it (Shelton's) fault for pulling this kind of stunt? Or do crowds react in spontaneous and unpredictable ways?
Mattman: The crowd behavior could have been anticipated. It kind of depends on who the people are, of course. If you have New York's high society and you throw $10,000 off of a balcony, they probably wouldn't fight each other. But for the average person there's pretty predictable behavior in something like that.
Times: There were a number of homeless people who were attracted by the advance publicity who came from a nearby park and there were also a number of young people, as you might imagine. Not a lot of New York high-society types.
Mattman: As a general comment, one could say that when you put on an event of any kind you should have an understanding of what the risks are. In a case like this, again with the caveat that I don't have all the facts, I would think that the behavior of the crowd could have been anticipated. There may have been ways to control that behavior through a variety of actions. Allow only a certain number of people, change the area, for example.
Times: But I'm wondering more about the nature of crowd mentality. We read a lot about violence at soccer matches in Europe and there was a recent incident in India in which 39 people were trampled to death at a religious festival. Those are much more serious events, but is there something they have in common with a small incident such as we experienced?
Mattman: I think there is. The progression is from an assembly to a crowd to a mob. In this particular instance it sounds like when the money came flying the behavior that was taught to people as part of our culture was discarded and almost an animal instinct takes over.
With the soccer matches there are a number of reasons why so many people got hurt. Some of it was crowd-control issues, like the one in England where they just let people in, and in front there was a metal gate and people couldn't go anywhere. There the crowd was really passive.
On the other hand, you have a crowd mentality in the running of the bulls (in Pamplona, Spain), you have it in Carnival in Brazil where people just get lost as individuals in the crowd and the crowd just changes its mentality and becomes a mob. In the mob, all individual responsibility for their action disappears.
Times: Is there a tipping point in size that turns an assembly into a crowd into a mob?
Mattman: No, it would depend on the space available. There is a relationship between the area that is available and the number of people. But not all the time, however.
I was involved in a case in which quite a number of people were injured in a sale in a department store. People rushed in. These were nice ladies outside the door, but they kind of turned into combatants and animals when they got in. There was more trampling rather than fighting. I would imagine in your case it was collateral injuries to efforts to reach the money?
Times: We have one disturbing photo of a young girl who is getting a hand in the face the way a running back would stiff-arm a defensive player. She has this look of shock and horror. You read in the story that she was knocked down and had to be pulled out. The guy who is hitting her is looking at her, he's not looking at the money. You get the impression that the money was almost forgotten about, and some people were just acting out violently.
Mattman: In a case like that it sounds like some people assumed the mob mentality. Sometimes in political rallies you have that, too, where the entire population of a group will turn into a mob and will do things that individually they would never do. They kind of get lost, and instead of being X number of individuals they become a blob that has a common goal.
Times: What are some of the other factors that create dangerous crowds? We talked about the lack of space.
Mattman: The lack of a direction to move is one. Disney World and Disneyland are famous for handling that with their zigzag waiting lines. This is a very simple thing, but if you look at football stadiums and race tracks and what have you, there has been a tremendous improvement in how the crowd flows and how it's being directed. Even though the crowd may not know they are being manipulated, they really are in a very passive sense.
It used to be a typical English soccer stadium would have one entrance and people would just try to find their seats. I think Americans have made tremendous progress, especially in football stadiums where you have as many as 20 entrances that lead right to the seats.
Times: That removes the element of competition, I suppose.
Mattman: It does that, but it also eliminates opposite crowd flow, annoying encounters where people get stuck in a bottleneck and tempers flare, especially when there's a big tailgate party before the game. What we've tried to do is make the crowd movement as unobstructed as we possibly can and put the controls in as early as we can, rather than at the end.
I've invented a risk assessment model that addresses crowd control and crowd management. I have been working for major sponsors, Coca-Cola, Philip Morris, Miller Brewing, in doing risk assessments for events where they were the title sponsor.
Times: What kind of factors would you be assessing?
Mattman: Everything from environmental, such as weather, to law enforcement, to capabilities of first responders, to alcohol sales, the demographics of the spectators. We look at everything and then give each item a value. Sometimes there are compound values, such as alcohol and drugs and heat; the total is much more than the individual items.
Times: What are some of the more common mistakes establishments make when they're organizing events?
Mattman: When you're talking about repeat events, baseball games, for example, there is an advantage because they can draw on experience. You don't see the mistakes that you do at what I call the special events, the ones that happen once a year or sometimes never before.
The primary area that needs to be addressed is how the crowd moves, what you do with the crowd and what do they do afterward and how is the crowd affected by stimulus. It may be the home team doing extremely well or doing extremely poorly, or an opposing gang or opposing fans. We factor everything in.
This is a side note, but I was in Buenos Aires (Argentina) a year ago and attended a soccer match between two arch-rivals. They put a 20-foot-high fence to divide the stadium into two sections. When the game was over, the section I was in had to wait an hour so the police could disperse the other fans who were permitted to leave right away. It was an extremely effective way to control crowd behavior. The other thing they did was in both end zones, they had fire hoses and every 15 minutes they just sprayed the people down to cool them off, both literally and figuratively.
