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

[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?