Call control is one of those things that most people don't think about in their daily lives.
My sons and I don't think about it very much either.
Just the other night we were watching YouTube
and we enjoyed a nice science video.
At the end of the video one of the new video suggestions was about crowd control.
We decided that sounded quite intriguing so we checked it out.
The video was about accidents that happened in crowd control.
What we're talking about is a place
where people get crowded.
They talk a little bit in technical terms
about just how crowded it needs to be before it gets dangerous.
I think they said 1 m square with five people standing there.
Indeed, that would be very crowded when you get hundreds of people.
If you approach that density of people, then you have problems.
The video is very careful to explain that
if everybody has the same purpose and they're working together,
then crowd control tends to not be much of a problem.
On the other hand when everybody is
working for self-motivated goals
that are in competition with other people,
then you have a recipe for disaster.
The problem with crowd control is that
people start pushing and when they push from behind
they don't realise what's happening to the people up in front of them.
They can't see it, nor can they experience it.
Unfortunately the people up in front of them are getting pushed and squished together
They end up getting squished so much that they can't breathe.
There were numerous incidents in the last 20 years
where tens or even hundreds of people died
as a result of this poor crowd control.
I don't want to say that it happens in only this country
or only that country,
because there were accidents that happened across the world.
The good thing about the movie was that it gave us
some ideas for how to plan
and prepare for situations like this and prevent them.
Although there isn't any surefire mechanism
that we can use to stop this there are some signs to look for.
One of the great ironies that I took out of that movie,
was the irony that many of the accidents
that happened were actually stimulated by police.
Had it not been for the police intervention the crowd control
that led to the deaths of people would not have happened.
So this clearly is a sign that we need to involve better policing.
Of course that's easier said than done.
Personally, my take on it is we need to raise people better and in order to raise people better we need people
to police themselves better on the inside.
But that's the story for another video.
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