I misread a thread title, but then it occurred to me that my mistake might make an interesting thread in its own right.
Have any of you ever encountered a mob? Run away from a mob? Been part of a screaming, rock-throwing mob?
Myself, no, no, and no, but I know many of you have much more exciting lives than I do. 
Not me personally, but a friend once picked a fight with a fraternity. At their frat house. When the whole frat was outside the house drinking. After the frat had been kicked off campus for fighting.
In his defense, he was a pretty fast runner.
Perhaps you should have posted this in the Game Room–as probably a large number there have been to a soccer match, hockey game, football game where the fans got out of control. [pull down the goal posts…]
Or perhaps in Cafe Society if they have seen a mob of young teenage girls pursue their teen idol… [they would not be throwing rocks but wanting a piece of clothing, a clip of hair…]
Not intentionally, but the crowd I was in was sufficiently unruly that we got tear-gassed. I had gone to Washington DC in 1969 to participate in a march against the Vietnam War, which was generally peaceful. Late in the day, however, while heading for the Greyhound Terminal to get out of town, I and my buddy inadvertently found ourselves in the midst of a more hostile crowd in front of the Department of Justice. All of a sudden we found ourselves confronted by a line of riot police firing tear gas canisters at us. I high-tailed it as fast as I could. I only got a whiff of the gas, but that was enough.
At the 1994 World Cup, Belgium defeated Morocco during the group stage. Morocco had played much better, had had a couple of very clear goal opportunities but didn’t score and when the game ended, it was 1-0 for Belgium.
As soon as it was over, hundreds of people gathered in my home town’s centre to celebrate. There’s a small river that runs through it. On the other side, a crowd was also gathering. That part of the town was populated by immigrants and Belgians of Moroccan descent. You can see where this is going.
Fistfights broke up immediately. For about an hour, groups of angry young men would run from “their” side, cross the main bridge, throw a few punches here and there then be pushed back only for the same thing to happen in the other direction. I mostly stayed away from it all but at one point things got a bit too close for comfort and I decided that it was a good time to go back home…
I have watch a mob riot around my apartment building and the surrounding few blocks, burn some police cars and some small businesses, and break a few thousand windows. There was enough tear gas that I could smell it from my window 6 floors up. A good chunk of the time was spent with some of the other residents on the front stoop of the building watching the rioting crowds surge back and forth along the street. We wanted to make sure they didn’t try to burn down our homes.
All in all, it was very entertaining.
Once I was part of a mob, though a very mild, non-destructive mob. There was a July 4th fireworks show at the DC Mall, and they let the crowd (me among them) get way too close to the fireworks. At the huge finale they were also setting the fuses to go off way too low. And all of the sudden there were thousands of burning embers and fireworks fragments falling out of the sky and some even exploding on the ground among thousands and thousands of people.
Um, we ran. Out into the streets … away. There were a few people hurt, no one killed that I know of.
In 1989, my family and I walked up out of a subway stop right into the middle of a huge Velvet Revolution demonstration in Wenceslas Square. These things had hundreds of thousands of people joining in. I thought it best for us to catch the next train back to our hotel.
Two political almosts:
Turned from a quiet side street onto a main road in Rome (late 90s) and accidentally was swept up in a fairly loud pro-Communist Part march. That was momentarily disconcerting.
In Edinburgh encountered a three-way confrontation between the B[?]NP (fascists), some anarchists and I think the Scottish nationalists. Not large in number but very aggressively shouting at each other and needing to be restrained by the police (gently).
For the last year, I’ve been working at a UK football ground. Yeah, I’d say I have.
The final match of last season ended with police horses on the pitch, and the two lots of fans charging each other in the car park, and being forced apart by a second line of police.
Orginally that day, I was supposed to be on the crowd control first response team (I’m not very big, but they normally have one woman on the team in case they have to search or otherwise physically deal with women), but I got swapped out last minute for a guy (who got his jaw broken in the melee).
I got to watch from the safest place in the whole stadium- inside one of the bars, with one solitary fan who was just as happy to be out of it as I was.
I’ve seen smaller mobs there a few times (and been on the team that had to try deal with 'em), and walked through one or two minor riots in town, but that’s been the biggest I’ve seen in person.
Several times, most in Pakistan during my school/college years.
We lived next door to a very politically active college. During the early days of the military government in 1978-79, there were many student takeovers of the college buildings, followed by police/military sieges. Sometimes students would climb over the 8’ high walls of our garden to escape arrest or just avoid the tear gas. We had to close up the house tight to keep the tear gas out. After a couple of weeks, we decamped to some relatives house for almost the whole school year.
Around 1983 a political group started agitating in the packed Karachi Stadium during an international cricket match. Must have been 30,000+ people in the stadium. The response was what seemed like indiscriminate use of tear gas and baton charges. Have no idea what the casualty count was, but the crush at the exits was so dangerous we realized it was better to take our chances and remain in the stadium.
Our institute at the University was attacked by two mobs. One was angered by the free mixing of men and women in the classes and “common rooms”. Other schools had separate common rooms for men and women, and even in the lecture halls men and women were seated in sections seperated by an aisle, even a curtain. The other mob was angered by our institute’s refusal to use ethnic quotas for admission.
The institutes bus was also attacked and burned by a mob of Islamic fundamentalist “students” for playing un-Islamic music. The burning wasn’t very successful. After this incident classes were moved to a location outside the main university campus.
Finally in 1990 I was managing a store in a very run-down area in Alexandria Virginia. The area was being contested by Vietnamese and Salvadoran gangs. One Sunday afternoon there was a full blown “rumble”. The security guard came in and told us to lock the doors, roll down the metal shutters, and move all employees and customers to the stockroom in the back. Several of our cars were damaged. In fact a couple of customers sued the company (a huge global drugstore chain) for false imprisonment and for the damage done to their cars. They claimed that they could have gotten themselves and their vehicles to safety if we hadn’t locked down the store. No idea how that ended up, but it never went to trial.
In 1971 the Pirates won the World Series. I was 12. My dad took us downtown to experience pandemonium. Even he was shocked by how wild things got.
Back in my college days I lived in the North Hill dorms at the University of Maryland. It started off as a snowball fight between two dorms. Then someone said “Lets get South Hill!” So off we went. Had to be about 100 people at the time. So we went to South Hill and had a big snowball fight. Then someone said “Lets get the high rises!” So off went the combined might of North and South Hill dorms. Hundreds of people. We marched off across campus gathering up people as we went. By the time we got to the other dorms it was pretty rowdy. Some members of the baseball team were able to launch snowballs through open windows 5-6 floors up and there was much rejoicing. Then the cops showed up and the mob broke up.
That was pretty innocent as mobs go but being in it let me feel the mob mentality. You get a definite feeling of empowerment.
I was on the scary end of a small mob once.
I was stationed in Germany during Desert Storm. Actually this was a little earlier during Desert Shield. Me and a friend were walking in town going to a bar. It was kind of a back alley open only to foot traffic. Suddenly a large group of Turks (I don’t know for certain they were from Turkey but at that time in Germany a Middle Eastern looking male was most likely to be from Turkey) came around the corner going the opposite way. They pushed through us not quite assaulting us. As they went by one started chanting “Saddam! Saddam!” They all took up the chant. Although they were probably just fucking with us it was scary because we were unarmed and outnumbered 20-1.
Back in my younger days, I walked out of a movie unknowingly into the middle of a riot. Philly – 1964. Still have the customized skull as a reminder.
Been in some smaller and/or friendlier mobs since then like the annual motorcycle ride on Washington by choice. But that event when I was a kid still has me starting to get nervous at anything much over a dozen people.
I was at the game when the Bills beat the Raiders for the Conference Championship in 1990. It was the first time Buffalo was going to the Superbowl. So the crowd at the stadium went pretty wild. There were people running out into the field and tearing down the goalposts and fighting the cops who were trying to stop them. I personally just hung out in my seat and watched.
I was also working at Attica when they had a prison riot. Not the famous one you heard about. This was another one about a decade later. But we had learned a lot from the famous one so this one got handled a lot better and nobody was taken hostage or killed.
I was in The Mount Pleasant neighborhood,trying to buy weed on the street on the first night of the Mt. pleasant riot 1991 Washington, D.C., riot - Wikipedia. We saw something going on a couple of blocks away, someone yelled out their window “get off the street white boy,” so I did.
I sort of encountered a mob once.
It was early autumn of last year, and it was midnight. I decided to take a shortcut through a park, while thinking, “Montreal’s such a safe city that I can feel perfectly safe just walking through a park at midnight.” Just then, I was approached by a group of rowdy drunk guys. I thought, “Oh my goodness, what do they want from me?”
It turned out that they were from Ottawa, and they were having a bachelor party, and all they wanted was for me to take a picture of them in front of the park fountain. I was happy to do so. 
I was having to go to the local hospital twice a day for an infusion of antibiotics for an infection after surgery. My last trip as we were going to leave the nurses said hang around for a while as there was a mob of very angry young men outside of the hospital. Now being a small town the mob was maybe 20 or 25 strong, but we certainly had no desire to encounter them. So we hung around until they disbursed.
Back in the late 1980s I lived in Virginia Beach, and my OB/GYN was in the same building as an abortion clinic [or at least another OB/GYN who did do abortions] and my friend and I were headed in for her 7th month wellness checkup and we got into a pushing match with a bunch of fucking biblepounders convinced she was going in for an [illegal] abortion. I got arrested for breaking some dumb bitch’s jaw after she poured pigs blood on me. Asshole judge was obviously another biblepounder asshole, it was caught on camera that she assaulted me first, dumped blood on me first and pushed me first. I appealed and got it reversed. Somewhere there is video of a tiny very pregnant woman looking like a cocktail olive on toothpicks and a friend in a swirl of about 20 asshole protesters complete with jars of pigs blood and a really good solid fist to the face of a protester.
There’s going to be the annual mob in Columbus, Oh. on the evening of Nov 29. They’ll be on N. High St. between 11th Ave. and 19th Ave. I attended twice. If you must attend, I couldn’t more strongly recommend you AVOID wearing any clothing that’s blue and maize (yellow).