Southern Rail and the psychology of crowd safety

I was asked today to appear on BBC Radio to comment on a report from the Association of British Commuters which described the recent experiences of passengers on Southern Rail trains and platforms. These testimonies painted a picture of stress, anxiety and fear for many passengers. The passengers’ concerns seemed understandable. People did not feel safe on the trains and platforms.

Based on the research on the psychology of crowd safety, two factors that are important in enhancing or diminishing the sense of safety that people feel in a crowd: density and relationships of trust.

On density, we know that density of five people per square metre (5ppm2) and above is objectively dangerous. Any push in a crowd of this density can cause a shock wave and a fatal crush. And dense crowds have very poor front-to-back communication, meaning that those at the back of a crowd have no idea how dense and dangerous it is at the front. So those at the back of a densely-packed platform could accidentally push those at the front onto the rail without realising.

Yet our research has shown that, in many crowds of far greater density than 5ppm², people report feeling safe. This is what we found in our study of pilgrims’ experiences in the Grand Mosque, Mecca, during Hajj. So what is the other factor that matters, that might be responsible for the feelings of anxiety and fear among Southern Rail passengers?

The other factor is a relationship of trust – specifically between the crowd and those managing the crowd, as our research on other kinds of stressful crowd events has shown. Commuters on trains rely on the company managing the trains and the stations. They rely on them:

·       To manage the numbers. When this isn’t done it undermines trust and confidence.

·       To have sufficient personnel available. This is one of the problems highlighted by the Association of British Commuters (ABC) report.

·       To ensure the personnel are sufficiently trained. One passenger comment in the ABC report is this: ‘on strike days, … more concern for me is that there never seem to be any safety-qualified staff either on the stations or on the trains’

·       To communicate reliably and regularly

If the company cannot be relied upon to do these things, the result is quite understandable passenger fear and anxiety.

Finally, the BBC asked me about the dangerous behaviour by some passengers. Crowds of people made ‘mad dashes’ across platforms to get to trains, sometimes risking their own and others’ safety. And there were repeated reports of fighting.

Anxiety and fear alone cannot account for these responses. When we looked at the behavioural responses of those commuters caught up in the London bombings of July 7th 2005, we found fear but we found almost none of these ‘antisocial’ responses. In both cases (bombing and Southern Rail today) there was ‘scarcity’ – either of safe passage or of trains running. But only in the case of Southern Rail today are these passengers put in the position of being individuals competing against other individuals. With a scarcity of trains, people defined as ‘customers’ compete, like people fighting over bargains in a sale. And with no reliable information from the companies, it is not surprising that people treat the next train as perhaps their last chance of getting home. Based on what we know about how common fate changes the boundaries of concern for people faced with disaster, perhaps the solution is collective identity and action as passengers (not ‘customers’) to change the current situation for the common good.

Bringing Crowd Psychology into Event Safety Management

http://www.festivalinsights.com/2015/07/bringing-crowd-psychology-event-safety-management/

Identifying with a crowd can increase crowd safety, Sussex study finds

Identifying with a crowd can increase crowd safety, Sussex study finds

Talking about Hillsborough: ‘Panic’ as discourse in survivors' accounts of the 1989 football stadium disaster Cocking 2013 Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology Wiley Online Library

Talking about Hillsborough: ‘Panic’ as discourse in survivors' accounts of the 1989 football stadium disaster Cocking & Drury (2013)  Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology


ABSTRACT
Popular representations of crowd behaviour in disasters are often characterised by irrationalist discourses, in particular ‘mass panic’ despite their rejection by current scientific research. This paper reports an analysis of four survivors’ accounts of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster to investigate if and how they used the term ‘panic’. Reference to ‘panic’ occurred frequently, but more detailed analysis found that their accounts did not match the classic criteria for ‘mass panic’ (e.g. uncontrolled emotion and selfish behaviour). Indeed, participants referred to ‘orderly’ behaviour, and cooperation, even when they said the threat of death was present. ‘Panic’ was therefore being used as a description of events that was not consistent. A discourse analysis of usage suggests that participants used ‘panic’ not only to convey feelings of fear and distress but also to apportion culpability towards the actions of the police who they considered responsible for the tragedy (as indeed recent independent research has confirmed). It is concluded that the term ‘panic’ is so deeply embedded in popular discourse that people may use it even when they have reason to reject its  irrationalist implications. Alternative discourses that emphasise collective resilience in disasters are suggested.
Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Key words: mass panic; social identity; collective resilience; Hillsborough football disaster; discourse
analysis
Link to article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/casp.2153/full

Hillsborough and ‘crowd control’

The Independent Report into the 1989 Hillsborough football crowd tragedy has found that police made ‘strenuous efforts’ to shift blame for the 96 deaths to fans themselves. In today’s news coverage, the disaster itself is sometimes described as a ‘failure of crowd control’. These words echo the conclusions of the 1990 Taylor enquiry into the tragedy, which recommended all-seater stadia for English football grounds.

The words ‘crowd control’ are worth considering for a moment. Whenever my own research and specialism is described as ‘crowd control’ (which is quite often), I try to explain that this is wrong in important ways. I teach a course on 'crowd safety management' to crowd safety and events professionals, and the classic statement of the issue we refer to when we discuss this topic is that by Fruin, who is perhaps worth quoting at length:

‘Although the terms crowd management and crowd control are often used interchangeably, there are important differences. Crowd management is defined as the systematic planning for, and supervision of, the orderly movement and assembly of people. Crowd control is the restriction or limitation of group behavior.’ (Fruin, 2002, p. 6).

Fruin goes on to say ‘Inappropriate or poorly managed control procedures have precipitated crowd incidents rather than preventing them.’

Or, the way I put it in my lecture: ‘Approaching the crowd with a view to crowd control risks undermining crowd safety.'

Why? Part of the reason, I would argue, hinges on the dynamic relationship between crowd behaviour and the representations of crowds held by those responsible for crowd management (or crowd control). For crowds only need to be ‘controlled’ when someone thinks they represent a problem.

Broadly, there are two dominant types of representation of 'crowd problems' needing ‘control’. These can be found in both popular discourse and in academic accounts. The first suggests that, in crowds, there is a process of submergence, whereby individuals lose their sense of self and hence their intelligence and self control, becoming ‘swept up’ by any sentiment or behaviour spreading through the mass. The second representation, convergence, suggests that problematic crowds consist of problematic individuals – people who are already lacking in intelligence and self control – who in the crowd act as they do alone ‘only more so’, as Floyd Allport put it. These two accounts are often employed in loose combination in order to explain what is seen as irrational or mindless behaviour in crowds.

In my lecture on ‘crowd management versus crowd control’ on the crowd safety management module, one of our key examples is the Hillsborough tragedy. As the report published today reminds us, certain newspapers, most notably The Sun, claimed that the crushing of fans in the football stadium was due to ‘football hooliganism’. The journalists and the police said the crowd that day was inherently a problem because it represented the convergence of drunken individuals seeking gratuitous violence and ‘disorder’.

The cruel irony is that these fans that were vilified were the very people trying to save others, and in some cases risking their own lives to do so. As part of our ESRC-sponsored study of mass emergency behaviour, we interviewed some survivors of Hillsborough tragedy, who described a deeply harrowing scene yet also one of great humanity, as illustrated in the following extracts (taken from Drury, Cocking, & Reicher, 2009):

‘The behaviour of many people in that crowd and simply trying to help their fellow supporters was heroic in some cases. So I don’t think in my view there was any question that there was an organic sense of … unity of crowd behaviour. It was clearly the case, you know.. it was clearly the case that people were trying to get people who were seriously injured out of that crowd, it was seriously a case of trying to get people to hospital, get them to safety.. I just wish I’d been able to.. to prevail on a few more people not to.. put themselves in danger.’

‘It should be source of great pride to those people I think because you know, they were clearly in control of their own emotions and their own physical insecurity I mean a lot of people were very.. as I was you know.. you’re being pushed, you’re being crushed when you’re hot and bothered you’re beginning to fear for your own personal safety and yet they were I think controlling or tempering their emotions to help.. try and remedy the situation and help others who were clearly struggling’

 Picture courtesy of http://menmedia.co.uk

However, it wasn’t simply after the event that the police explained the disaster as due to drunken ‘hooligans’. Crucially, this view of the crowd was at the forefront of all their planning and the responses they made during the tragedy. This has been shown both in published research and is clear from numerous statements in the Independent Report published today:

‘It is evident from the disclosed documents that SYP [South Yorkshire Police] were preoccupied with crowd management, segregation and regulation to prevent potential disorder ... The Fire Service, however, raised concerns about provision for emergency evacuation of the terraces’

(p. 11)

And again on page 12:

‘a policing and stewarding mindset predominantly concerned with crowd disorder ... the delay in realising that the crisis in the central pens was a consequence of overcrowding rather than crowd disorder.’

And again on page 15:

‘the ‘prevention of hooliganism’ and ‘public disorder’ was the main priority. The custom and practice that had evolved within SYP for packing the pens was concerned primarily with controlling the crowd.’

‘Crowd control’ meant treating fans like animals, neglecting their safety. As Fruin says, crowd control is the ‘restriction or limitation’ of crowd behaviour – and this is done when someone regards that crowd as a ‘problem’. Crowd control is achieved with means such as barriers or coercion, which risk injury and even fatalities in the crowd.

These days, the leading crowd event safety experts agree that many problems in crowd events – including some of the most well-known crowd disasters – are due to problems in crowd management. Examples would example the failure to plan for sufficient space for the size and flow speed of the crowd, and the failure to communicate adequately with the crowd.

This kind of analysis, which moves attribution for crowd disasters away from the supposedly inherent psychological problems of the crowd (whether of ‘convergence’ or ‘submergence’) to deficiencies in management and planning, is a positive development. It suggests that crowd disasters are not simply something that ‘just happens’ from time to time due to the inherently primitive psychology of the crowd; rather, crowd disasters are preventable through improvements in knowledge about, and hence to the practice of, crowd safety management. It is far too late for the Hillsborough tragedy, of course, but the increased scientific interest in the psychology of crowd safety management, in both research and academic contexts, is a vital contribution to the critique of ‘crowd control’ and hence to safer crowd events in the future.

References

Drury, J., Cocking, C., & Reicher, S. (2009). Everyone for themselves? A comparative study of crowd solidarity among emergency survivors. British Journal of Social Psychology, 48, 487-506.

Fruin, J. J. (2002). The causes and prevention of crowd disasters. Originally presented at the First International Conference on Engineering for Crowd Safety, London, England, March 1993 (Revised exclusively for crowdsafe.com, January 2002.)