Fundamentals of Crowd Management
I have joked over the years that I’m more qualified to run security at a stadium concert than an IT shop, and it’s somewhat true. My security career started way back at the young age of 18 when I started working on the event staff at CU Boulder, and for Contemporary Services Corporation (CSC), who managed most of the Denver venues. By 21 I was running security at CU and supervising for CSC – managing or supervising sports, music, and other events ranging from under 100 people to over 100,000. Sometimes I was in charge, sometimes I just managed one area, and I was often a rover/troubleshooter. I did this multiple times a week for about 4-5 years (including working summers at Red Rocks), then dropped down to occasional contract work for bigger events after that. Including some with extreme logistical complexity, high risk profiles, or other complicating factors. (Like the time my employees called to ask why the bomb squad was walking around and Secret Service snipers were in the rafters). I was also fortunate the the people I worked with were true professionals. Crowd management is an industry filled with low-bid/minimum-wage contract firms with very poor work ethics and management. CSC are the guys who run the Super Bowl and most other ‘massive’ events, and I learned a hell of a lot from them and running my own teams. I have been watching a lot of the coverage of the Occupy movement and the police response and see a series of common, preventable mistakes being made over and over. Rather than specifically criticizing YouTube clips without context, here are some of the fundamental principles I learned over the years with comments on mistakes I see. Deescalate. Always. – The single most important fundamental is that crowd management is all about deescalation. You’ll never outnumber the crowd… and the more tension rises, the greater the chance of physical conflict or transitioning to a riot. There are always more of them than of you. Peer security is more effective than policing – Peer security the principle of staffing the event with demographic peers of the attendees. Police are law enforcement officers, and so they naturally and unavoidably escalate any situation they are at, by the role they play in society and the weapons they carry. Unarmed peers of the crowd have much greater flexibility in response – they are not required to arrest or enforce all laws, they are not perceived as the same kind of threat, they do not carry weapons, and they do not have arrest authority. Weapons are not your friend in a crowd – Crowds are messy, fluid affairs that make it impossible to maintain a safe stand-off distance. I have never met an intelligent police officer who went into a crowd without more than a little fear that someone would try to grab their OC spray, handgun, or other tools. Where I worked, peer security would go into crowds and pull people out for the police – who would almost never enter the crowd itself. Know your crowd – You can fully predict the behavior of a crowd if you know the demographic and environmental conditions. I know how everything from the weather, to ages, to kinds of music affect a crowd… and it isn’t what you’d think. For example, serious injuries (and deaths) were far more common at Grateful Dead and Blues Travelers shows than metal bands with mosh pits. Slow and steady wins the race – When dealing with an uncooperative but nonviolent crowd, you have to eat at it bit by bit. From dispersing a crowd to ejecting a big group, you have to handle it piece by piece and person by person – even when force is used. That goes for removing tents (yes, I have had to do that at ‘campout’ events) and clearing the aisles at a Dead show so people could move around. The more authority you have, the less you should look like security – This was one of my favorite tricks – when I ran events I rarely wore an event staff shirt. As the last person able to deescalate most conflicts before turning someone over to the police, the more I looked like a normal person or non-security staff the better. If they think you’re with the band/team, even better. Defense in depth – Crowd management is like IT security – you need multiple people with different specialties, properly trained and positioned. For example, I hated going into a mosh pit without a spotter. At a large stadium show I might have 500 people working for me. We’d have rovers, ticket takers, people inside and outside, folks dedicated to ejections, supplementing medical (to help them through the crowd), and more. When you need to use force, don’t hesitate, but don’t hit – I have no problem using force when it is needed (and we frequently had to, especially to break up fights). In a crowd your goal is to get the person out of the crowd as fast as possible. You never punch or kick… that is excessive use of force (the exception is when you are in serious danger yourself). Your goal is to solve the problem without anyone getting hurt. Deescalation, remember? Spontaneous crowds aren’t riots – I sometimes dealt with spontaneous crowds appearing where we didn’t expect them, which weren’t tied to a normal event. Usually these were campouts, but I was also called into a few protests and such when the police wanted trusted people in the crowd but not uniformed officers. All normal crowd dynamics still apply. Riots are for the police – Crowds need peer security. Riots need cops and all the OC spray you can get your hands on. A riot is an uncontrolled situation where mob behavior takes over and there is serious damage to life/safety and property. I was at a Guns ‘n’ Roses show we thought might turn into a riot when that ass-hat Axl
