Crowd Management: Ensuring Safety and Order in Large Gatherings

TL;DR

Crowd management is the systematic process of planning, organizing, and monitoring large gatherings to ensure safety and security. It involves anticipating risks, implementing preventive measures, and coordinating multiple stakeholders including event organizers, venue staff, and law enforcement. Through proper planning, technology integration, and trained personnel, crowd management helps prevent disasters and creates safe, enjoyable events.

1. What Is Crowd Management?

Crowd management is the systematic process of planning, organizing and monitoring large gatherings of people with the objective to establish a safe and secure environment and maintaining a minimum level of space to avoid panic and rapid crowd movements.

Crowd management anticipates and plans for the worst case, such as fire or riots and aims to reduce and mitigate the risks associated with it way in advance. The project of crowd management begins before the gathering, continues throughout and ends after the gathering or event.

2. Where Is Crowd Management Used?

Crowd management is often used or required in public spaces and events such as:

3. Who Uses Crowd Management?

Crowd management processes are typically established by the event organizer and/or law enforcement agencies. The successful implementation of a crowd management plan requires the cooperation of all involved parties, from venue staff to event organizers to law enforcement.

4. Context of Crowd Management

Crowd Management is a multi-faceted field with an array of disciplines ranging from event planning, crowd simulation for evacuation analysis to security management. Crowd management plays a critical role in ensuring safe, secure events for attendees.

5. Crowd Management vs Event Risk Management

Crowd Management is a part of the event risk management. While crowd management focuses on the risks that come from the crowd and crowd movement, event risk management has a wider scope of risks such as weather conditions, minor and elderly protection, food safety, medical assistance and transportation.

6. Crowd Management vs Crowd Control

Crowd management is focused on prevention of crowd disasters and includes pre-event activities such as planning of capacities, escape routes and signage.

Crowd control is a sub process of crowd management that enforces or restores order by restricting or limiting group behavior. Crowd control can include measures such as the use of force, arrest, or threat of personal injury by security personal or law enforcement agencies.

7. Measures of Crowd Management

For successful crowd management it is important to realize that crowd behavior is not random but follows rules and patterns which can be predicted. The crowd behavior is essentially a result from physical, physiological, psychological and social needs of humans including:

An insufficient consideration of such factors can promote disasters, particularly if shortcomings accumulate.

8. The Crowd Manager

The crowd manager and its team are responsible for the crowd management. Some countries require crowd managers for certain type of events or locations.

9. The Crowd Management Plan

The crowd management plan is central to covering all aspects of crowd management. It documents and asses central questions regarding crowd safety and security, including:

Having a detailed crowd management plan in place helps to improve on all aspects of the crowd management as it can be revised after each event. Several best practices exist to create a reliable and scientific crowd management plan.

10. Evacuation Simulation and People Flow Optimization

For large scale events a simulation of an evacuation and people flow might be required to understand if the event venue requires structural changes or the number of participants needs to be limited.

Furthermore, crowd simulations help to understand how long a crowd would need to leave the building or location in the event of an incident. With this information at hand, event operators can make informed decisions throughout the event.

11. Crowd Analysis and People Flow Monitoring

Video security systems help event operators to understand and monitor crowd behavior visually. Augmented with AI video analytics capabilities such as crowd counting or people flow measurement, cameras can provide powerful real-time crowd KPIs such as density per square meter, flow-rate and velocity to event operators and authorities.

When these KPIs start becoming abnormal, an alarm can be triggered in the video management system, notifying the operator who can decide on appropriate actions such as reducing inflow through access control, making an announcement or deploying additional security staff.

12. Crowd Estimation

The tool MapChecking by Anthony Catel allows to estimate the number of people in a given area given a certain density. The tool implements the Jacobs method, named after Herbert Jacobs, who invented it in the 1960s.

The tool has presets for light crowds (0.30 people per sqm), crowded spaces (2.00 people per sqm) and densely packed crowds (4.00 people per sqm).

13. Crowd Disasters

Crowd disasters or crowd collapses and crushes happen when the density of the crowd reaches or exceeds 4 to 5 persons per m². The crowd collapses in on itself, or becomes so densely packed that individuals are crushed. The pressure through the crowd on the lungs causes a lack of oxygen (Asphyxia) which can lead to death.

Conclusion

Crowd management is an important tool for keeping large groups of people safe. Unfortunately crowd disasters still happen. A concise crowd management plan and the use of technologies such as simulation, access control and intelligent video technologies can help event operators and authorities creating safer events.