A walk through the streets of Montevideo, Uruguay during Carnival 2005 turned into a race to escape for Robert Huish, an assistant professor of international development at Dalhousie University.
With a single act of violence, the festive streets of Uruguay became a mass of screaming, panicking people.
It began with an argument. A man and a woman were arguing loudly in the street and when the woman tried to walk away, the man “drop-kicked” her, sending the woman flying, Huish said.
An officer approached the scene and attempted to control the situation, but the man smashed a litre-sized beer bottle over the policeman’s head, according to Huish. Soon after, more police arrived and began hitting the man — hard.
“His face was a mess,” Huish said.
Within minutes, Huish said, the crowd realized what was happening and a Molotov cocktail was thrown. People either stayed to watch or tried to escape. The panicking crowd made it difficult for Huish and his friends to get away.
“We sort of froze and stopped when we saw the police hitting this guy,” he said. “But when the Molotov cocktail got tossed and then you could smell tear gas, we tried to run.”
Mob mentality
At the scene of a riot, people will either leave or become passive spectators, according to Huish. Those spectators risk being pulled into the group mentality of the moment, he said.
Mob mentality, or deindividuation, is a psychological state in which people lose their sense of personal identity and feel immersed in a group, according to Social Psychology Alive, a book that strives to help students understand how behaviour is influenced by social psychology.
The “formula” for a riot, Huish said, is the combination a number of factors: a compact space with few exits, an absence of civil authority, and a divisive issue.
“Throw in heavy drinking, and you have a powder keg ready to explode,” he said. “If [a person feels sufficiently anonymous], that can be the spark.”
The element of spontaneity is a large part of mob psychology, said Alberto Gomes, an anthropology professor at La Trobe University in Australia.
Gomes organized a staged flash mob in his class, where some students started doing a choreographed Bollywood dance. Eventually, the whole class was coaxed into joining in.
“The factor of surprise really makes it work,” Gomes said. “If they had been warned, it would have been just a group performance.”
It made the class feel comfortable and more close as a group, he said, after they were “taken in” by the mob.
A problem for security
Mob mentality is a big concern for the Edmonton Police Service, according to Sgt. Robert Brekke, the department’s public safety unit commander.
Brekke said he’s seen plenty of riots break out. He’s currently training the entire police force in crowd control.
After the Edmonton Oilers won the NHL Western Conference in 2006, there was a serious riot, according to Brekke. A crowd of a few thousand on Whyte Avenue quickly grew to 50,000, and rioting began around the third period of the game.
A mob acts and thinks like one entity, Brekke said.
“The dynamic of a crowd changes one way or the other because of little things.”
Even co-ordinating volunteers during police training exercises can be a challenge, he added, because of the mob mentality that forms.
Anonymity, Brekke said, is the key to mob mentality. He stressed that it was important to distinguish between protests and a mob.
That said, even peaceful and legitimate protests can become confused and aggressive through the efforts of a few agitators, he said.
Anonymity can also result from identity-hiding clothing, like during the G20 riots, where Brekke and other Edmonton officers joined the Toronto police to help with security efforts.
“Masked people would emerge, cause trouble, and then take off their masks and blend in with the crowd,” Brekke said.
When a person is masked, the uninhibited side of their mind can emerge, making them feel anonymous and beyond the law, Brekke said.
Yet, in any given mob, the feeling of anonymity usually comes from being part of a large group, he added.
Preventing mob mentality
There are several techniques the police use to break up a hostile mob, Brekke said.
“If you can disperse the large crowd, the anonymity disappears,” he said.
“We can also use canisters of an agent, but if people are prepared for that, they’ll throw them back at you.”
A major part of handling mobs is preventing them from forming in the first place, Brekke said. During a big public event, one method is to give people large areas to gather in. People are much less likely to swarm and panic if the space isn’t confined, he said. The 2006 Edmonton riot occurred because a lot of excited, aggressive people were packed into one area, he said.
Dangers of the mob
“Anyone who tries to stop them becomes a target,” Huish said. “When a mob forms, it becomes a lawless space, and you need a really visible presence to restore order.”
Ottawa police has additional patrols on Halloween because large groups of people can behave “very irrationally,” said constable Henri Lanctôt.
“It’s the devil’s night, after all,” Brekke said.
People act differently when masked, he said, and Halloween by definition creates anonymity for large groups.
“Sometimes it’s just a monkey see, monkey do thing,” he said.
A small inciting action, he said, can be the thing that transforms a benign crowd into an irrational mob.
“It’s a small thing that starts [it], but people panic,” Huish said. “It’s almost like an electricity that goes through the air, and the next thing you know windows are being smashed, police are arriving, and that’s the rest of the night.”
