When I was building film sets, for serious security it was always pay-duty police officers, because otherwise, with low budget rent-a-cops (as in “security companies”) you run the risk that the only real training they have is to stand and look menacing in a uniform.
Sometimes, that’s all you need. Big guys in uniform looking like they can crack your skull are a good deterrent for stealing meat at the grocery store. But fore real, genuine crowd control, you need people who are actually trained in crowd control.
I used to run a store that was very close to the Orlando House of Blues (at Downtown Disney)…
You could always tell when a band with ahem “rowdy” fans (Snoop Dogg or just about any good rapper, hardcore/metalcore/thrash bands, reggaeton artists) was playing, because they’d have uniformed cops working security, instead of chunky guys in “SECURITY” t-shirts.
I’m absolutely disgusted. I can’t imagine a more blatant disregard for humanity, for a more trivial reason. These people are nothing but animals and deserve to be furiously flogged. I know they can’t actually be charged with anything, but I hope they recognize themselves for what they are: despicable creatures.
That’s the thing. I can understand that if you’re squished shoulder to shoulder with people, you may not be able to move to avoid stepping on someone, but who in their right mind would get to WM, see thousands of people milling in front of the doors at 5:00am and think to themselves: “Yeah, we want to be in the middle of that too!”
:smack:
If there’s a line up to get into a store, I go home.
While I appreciate your attempt to be funny, even though this is the pit, it isn’t really all that funny, is it? Someone died utterly needlessly. What if it had been someone you knew or cared about?
A disaster caused by overcrowding is understandable - but sticking around afterwards, for the event? That’s as if the soccer fans who did not get trampled to death in a stadium disaster sticking around for the game, even though they can see emergency services are hauling away the bodies of those who did.
The nature of a crowd is well known and not going to change. People are people. The guys at the front may have been guilty of bumping into the employee. The guys in the second wave probably didn’t even see him until they were on top of him. From there on back it was probably physically impossible for anyone to do anything except try and keep their on their feet.
Collectively, the crowd butchered a man to get 15% off on a DVD player. But no individual is guilty of anything more than the mildest level of assault. If the scene were replayed again tomorrow, odds are it would turn out more or less the same. There is one and only one answer to this situation and that is a well designed crowd control plan.
Store management did their very best to push the hype. OK, very well, that is their job. But considering the history of these things, the store should be required to file, fund, and follow a sound, scientifically based crowd control scheme. Much research is available on all aspects of crowds, from signs to security personnel to design of exits. I’m not suggesting extreme measures. But creating and promoting a competitive situation, and then leaving it up to a mob to sort themselves out, rewards aggressive assholes and IMHO is seriously irresponsible. No surprise that the front row of the crowd was composed mostly of aggressive assholes.
Therefore, anyone who puts on an event like this should be required to do effective crowd control. And if that cuts into their bottom line, tough shit.
Being trampled by large black males looking for… whatever this year’s Xmas craze is… is probably more dangerous than being trampled by middle aged white housewives looking for Tickle Me Elmos back in '96?
Hijack: The guys you hired got that? I think the only training I got was how to file reports. I am not kidding when I say that as a ‘security guard’ I was not allowed to even tell a person to stop–I could ask, and that was about it. And at 5’4", 100lbs, there was no way in hell I was pulling off any semblance of ‘menacing’.
The Riverfront Coliseum “crush” resulted in the deaths of 11 had some distinct differences though. Analysts looking back on the event determined that it wasn’t quite so much a stampede as a crush and the large group was made of pockets of people who were actively trying to help each other.
The crowd of ticket holders heard parts of a soundcheck and surged forward thinking the concert was starting, but the outer doors were still closed. Then when only two doors were opened, all it really did was create a bottleneck. So the “wave” squished people together and the deaths were due to compressive asphyxia.
In this case, it looks like everyone lurched forward, stomped through, and kept on shopping. :mad:
Giving folks the benefit of the doubt however, I will hazard a guess though, that whoever took the doors of the hinges may actually have helped to prevent more of a crush because at least a would-be crush could move forward. At least with everyone spreading out through the store you don’t get people pressed against closed doors.
They’ll also have to defend themselves from a lot of people who were traumatized by being in the crowd. They have two definite law suits - the pregnant woman in the hospital and the dead stock worker. They’ll have several hundred opportunistic lawsuits from people who were there - or will claim they were there - and suffered (or will claim to suffer) emotional distress or minor injuries.
Oh, shit! Sets and crowd control were supposed to be two separate ideas. My post was sloppy, let me clarify.
Back in my younger days, I used to work on the carp crew, building film sets. During this time, I noticed that for crowd control and during shooting, they always used pay-duty cops. When it came to just babysitting the set, they just had a production assistant hang out there all night with a walkie talkie. If they had to leave equipment on set, they might have uniformed security.
But no matter what, when it came to crowd control, especially if they were doing anything in a public space, they never, ever used anything less than the genuine police.
No one will fight for a bargain like a New Yorker aspiring to middle-class consumerism. This region starts trends, and was pretty much the cradle of the whole Black Friday phenomenon. I’ve lived in Westchester and shopped in Manhattan, and you sometimes wonder whether it’s in their collective DNA. Sometimes, around holiday time, I honestly didn’t know whether to despise them, pity them, or just pray for them.