Attention Wal-Mart Shoppers

[rowyn]

What bothers me most about this story is the section at the end. Where the police talk about pressing charges against Wal-Mart for not hiring more security, and Wal-Mart faults the police for not having more patrols out.

...

Shouldn't someone be blaming the people that actually trampled this poor man to death? The ones who tore the doors of the hinges? The ones who stomped on him, ignored him, didn't try to help him up, shoved the people in front of them so that they would have no choice but to rush forward heedlessly as well?

American need to learn how to queue. :(

Comments

[elusivetiger.livejournal.com]

Hell yes - one of our biggest problems is that we often feel someone must always be blamed, and it's always a corporation or government.

The ability to look in the mirror, an essential tool for individuals of any society who do not wish to be governed like cattle, is flagging.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

The people involved, a crowd of angry New Yorkers, did the killing en masse.

But mobs do not have Deep Pockets.

So despite the fact that this was one incident in hundreds of thousands of stores running Black Friday specials across the country that day, there are calls to sue Wal-Mart because they should have anticipated the murderous result of opening their store.

How many hundreds of thousands of security guards will need to be hired to meet such new legislation or to protect against liability? If you have a Starbucks, or a lemonade stand, and you're running Black Friday specials -- or Christmas specials -- or any sort of sale -- why, you're endangering the public.

And let's say that Wal-Mart had a crew of six security guards at the doors when the employee opened it. And they all got trampled. Well, then it obviously wasn't enough, and Wal-Mart should be sued. In fact, the security guards' families should sue them for endangering the employees by exposing them -- to their neighbors.

No doubt some of the people who drove a heel though the unfortunate employee's larynx, or stuck a toe in his eye, will sue Wal-Mart because they, too, suffered injury and trauma at the hands of their fellows.

Mob behavior is predictable, and easily anticipated. Wal-Mart should have easily been able to predict how many people would be trampled to death on Friday this year by extending the line from the hundreds of thousands who died last year in the same manner.

Had there been any.

===|==============/ Level Head

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

Mob behavior is predictable, and easily anticipated.

Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. In much the same way that the behavior of a bucket of water is predictable. Do I know the precise shape of the flow from the bucket, or the way that the droplets will splatter? No, but I don't need to know the details to know that whatever I pour the bucket onto will be getting wet.

Wal-Mart should have easily been able to predict how many people would be trampled to death on Friday this year by extending the line from the hundreds of thousands who died last year in the same manner.

So, thousands of stores, probably tens of thousands, had little or no problem with managing the crowds that rushed their stores. Would your hypothesis be that (a) the crowd at this particular Wal-Mart was unusually violent or vigorous, an outlier that stretched far beyond the norm; (b) that we have been by and large immensely lucky in that more trampling deaths aren't happening; or (c) that, as inconceivable as it might be, this Wal-Mart applied different and/or ineffective procedures that proved insufficient to the task at hand?

[level-head.livejournal.com]

All of (a), (b) and (c) are true.

The crowd was unusually violent or vigorous, since the reports of this sort of thing seems to have amounted to a total of one.

We have been immensely lucky, I think; this kind of thing happens (I am told) rather more frequently in Europe.

And Wal-Mart applied different procedures, in that they hired extra staff and security. As you suggest, they did not prove sufficient to the task at hand.

However, it's not clear to me that doubling the staff would have prevented the incident; we would not expect Wal-Mart employees or contract workers (which seems to be the case here) to defend the entry points of their closed store with deadly force.

The crowd seems to have resisted even police efforts to control them; police officers were said to have been "jostled" by the crowd when they arrived, and this is after a series of announcements trying to get control of the situation by informing the shoppers what had happened.

It seems to have been a bad situation.

===|==============/ Level Head

[rowyn]

It may well be fair to say that the management at this particular Wal-Mart failed to handle their crowd well. I don't actually know what they did or failed to do, though that one of their employees joked to the crowd about "opening early" was clearly in poor taste.

But to say that this makes them criminally negligent -- that holding a sale and then not handling the resulting crowd well is tantamount to shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre -- does not seem justifiable to me. Adult human beings ought to be capable of not pushing, shoving, or trampling other humans without some authority figure standing there telling them not to.

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

While human beings should be capable of such, it honestly shouldn't be a great surprise to anyone that by and large they aren't; certainly there's been no shortage of examples over the years, in a multitude of situations. We ought to be capable of not judging on surface details, but we haven't traditionally done so well with that either, for instance. And even when humans individually are capable, a mass of humans is an entirely different beast than the individuals that comprise it. I don't believe that criminal negligence should be assumed, but at the same time if the evidence can be found (e.g., documentation or testimony suggesting that this particular store chose to skimp on security in some fashion) then I can easily see how criminal negligence could be proven. The best analogy I can think of is to a floodwall: if, e.g., a state and the Army Corps of Engineers install a floodwall to protect a city and a thousand-year storm crests it, then there's no criminal negligence there; but if the state goes against expert recommendations and deliberately chooses a lower floodwall than the data suggests will hold, and the levee is breached, then that does rise to the standard of criminal negligence.

And then, of course, there's the issue of civil negligence -- where the standard of proof is innately and deliberately lower than in criminal cases, and where it seems that a lawsuit is not only inevitable, but also the appropriate and just means of redress for this circumstance.

[rowyn]

The analogy doesn't work for me because I don't see a mob as a natural disaster. A mob is made up of people who made the choice to be there. If a mob is a natural disaster, then aren't the people who choose to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the others there and make it impossible for them to control their own actions also responsible?