LPRC - CrimeScience Episode 55 – Preventing Crowd Violence ft. Dr. Tamara Herold (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

Dr. Tamara Herold, Associate Professor at the University of Nevada, and the Director of the Crowd Management Research Council, joins Dr. Read Hayes to discuss the recent riots, the science of crime, crowd management tactics to prevent violence, and much more. The post CrimeScience Episode 55 – Preventing Crowd Violence ft. Dr. Tamara Herold (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of the science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Be a leader in loss prevention by implementing integrated solutions that enhance safety, reduce shrink, and help to improve merchandising, operations, and customer service. operations, and customer service. Bosch Integrated Security and Communication Solutions spans zones one through four in the LPRC's zones of influence, while enriching the customer experience and delivering valuable data to help increase retail profitability. Learn more by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. Welcome everybody to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast. Today I'm joined by UNLV's Dr Dr. Tamara Herald. And again, we had conducted an earlier Crime Science episode talking about crime place networks and the incredible value in understanding the dynamics of place and crime, but how places are related and enable crime crews and individuals to move and store and transact and

meet and plan and chill out and hide out and all these sorts of things. So it's just incredible work, Tamara, and I really, really appreciate all that you've done over the years and a lot that you've done with Professor Eck, of course, at CINCI. So we thought what we'd do now is tap into your expertise on what we know around the crowd science, particularly though from a situational crime prevention standpoint. So welcome to Crime Science, Tim. Thank you so much. It's so great to be back. Excellent. So I thought what we'd do is maybe walk through it a little bit. And of course, our intent here is to help the practitioners better understand so that they can better, where it's possible, prevent and handle and recover. And then again, plan again for what

comes our way. In this case, some of the disorders they're dealing with that's on the extreme. We've had employees, as you know, shot and stabbed and beaten, and the same with even shoppers in the parking lots or law enforcement that are there trying to help and so on. So it's been a brutal and ugly scene. Some of our members have lost one to two dozen store locations totally destroyed by fire um we were on the on a call yesterday with one of our members who they had used concrete pallets and forklifts and things to sort of include some of the penetration in the building and um sure enough one of the the looters found a way in and even knew how to wreak havoc with a forklift. So, you know, there's just a lot going on. Their flooding stores are

just, it's a little chaotic. And in some cases, the employees have gotten out of the store in the nick of time. And in a way, it's almost like riders in the Old West where a police car will come zipping up in front. The officer or deputy will pile out of the vehicle and then warn them, hey, you got like five minutes or you got 10 minutes to get out. So there's been some interesting things. We've spent some quality time on an emergency cluster call with over 20 chains and helping them get briefed up, as you and I talked about a little bit ago, by CIA, FBI, and NYPD, recently retired officials who are still very plugged in, and then let them share what they're going through. So I thought when it comes to crime

science, what are some, let's say the genesis, and I know there are different types of crowds and they operate in different venues. So I'll kind of get out of your way and maybe talk the basics first about crowds. Sure. You know, I obviously, my background is crime science and I think that's how you and I connected a long time ago. And I found that that particular framework, that perspective is useful for pretty much every type of human behavior issue that you're looking at, that you want to tackle. And one of the best things about this particular framework and the reason I promote its use and I talk about it all the time is because I think you can scale it. So everything that you were just talking about, Reid, you were saying, you know, whether it's a one-on-one interaction, you know, whether it's a small

group interaction or whether you're talking about a really large crowd, including some of the demonstrations that we're seeing across the country right them down into some basic principles that if we can adhere to those principles, and if we can consider those principles as we're developing our strategies, as we're thinking about how we want to approach things, we're much more likely to be successful. And so for that reason, I've loved it. And, you know, my work, as you know, I've tried to expand upon that for crowds in particular. And I have to say, we've been pretty fortunate in the United States in terms of crowds and crowd violence. When I first started my research, I was at the University of Cincinnati, as you know, with Dr. John Eck, and I was studying with John, and he was just too busy. And the Department of Justice had come to him and said, we'd really like you to write

these problem-worrying policing guides on some crowd-related issues. And he said, I'm too busy, but I know a student. I think every successful professor can do this, right? Where they're able to say, hey, I'm too busy, but I know a student who'd be really interested in doing this. And so John did this to me, and it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. John was phenomenal. He gave me this opportunity, and I started my research on student party riots,

if you can imagine that. So at the time, Wisconsin and some other places across the United States were dealing with these student riots where students were flipping cop cars and setting things on fire. In fact, the dynamics look a lot like some of the protest dynamics that we're seeing across the country right now. And then that was really successful. So I moved into studying spectator violence at the request of Michael Scott at the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing. And so we started studying spectator violence. But of course, here in the United States, we have incidents of violence, but it's not, we don't see as many and the violence isn't as severe as we see in Europe and South America. So I spent the vast majority of my early research days studying crowds and crowd dynamics internationally. here because I think they've been dealing with much more serious, you know, incidents and events for a much longer period of time. And so we've been able to take some of their lessons learned and best practice and principles and bring them over here and begin to integrate those into our policies and procedures and just get better at this practice of crowd management. and just get better at this practice of crowd management.

That's great and good background. I appreciate that. And by drawing on that, on the different types of venues, like you mentioned, especially sporting events and how they're a little different, the crowds are different, seems to be pretty instructive. And I will, I'll be honest, never forget when I was traveling the world with the Gillette Company doing research around blade theft, and it's pretty universal, mock tree infusion blade theft, we were in Istanbul. And so what was going on is we went to all these countries and would meet with

the retailers and law enforcement all around this issue to understand it and see what we could do to disrupt these illicit networks. So in this case case we had the meetings uh went back to the hotel um i was getting ready to meet some people to go for dinner um but out my window i could literally see down in this valley this really neat looking uh lighted stadium and it was their football right soccer stadium and so it was russia and turkey were playing evidently well the next day yeah it was really neat just from way afar to see it down there what it looked like well anyway the next day at breakfast um two or three of the guys came in they looked pretty worse for wear and i guess fights broke out all around them and the police just basically started firing tear gas into the

stands where these and these guys were all brits in this case were sitting and nothing to do with anything and so they they were telling me they've never ever and they you know they've seen some hooliganism they've never been so scared in their life so and you know that's one of the lessons learned um i think that that's important to consider is that the indiscriminate use of force against an entire crowd is really the last thing you want to do, right? It's sort of, it's the thing that you want to avoid at all costs. And obviously, in some instances, and in some situations, it can't be avoided. But early policing strategies in the United States, that was very acceptable, right? You just fire.

You needed to do something with the crowd. So you just fire tear gas and you gas the whole crowd. And what we've learned is that we need to be very focused in our approach to managing crowd dynamics and really target just those individuals that, or those conditions that are causing harm. And that's, that was a big shift in perception and approach that helped us to become more effective at managing crowds. Excellent. And a huge point. And I went through back in an earlier life, I went through a little bit of law enforcement training in the crowd control part.

And, you know, being in Florida, there's a lot of opportunities for things like that. And then the Florida Army National Guard briefly during my army went through some of that training. Now, in that case, they were trying to separate the bad actors or move people from dangerous places or separate two crowds that are, you know,, against each other, their adversarial and things like that. Now I'm not sure how sophisticated that was probably 25 years ago, but how sophisticated it is now compared to them. But I saw, hopefully they had learned some lessons like you're talking about camera that, yeah, let's not just start firing away here. Let's have some kind of strategy here.

So let me talk a little bit about one thing I really got a lot out of, and that is the 2011 book that you edited and wrote in, Preventing Crowd Violence. A lot of good stuff in there. I did notice what you were talking about. Primarily, there was some good research around the European venues and some of the things they were going through. But really, the article that looks to be penned by you and Dr. Eck had some really neat tidbits. And we could spend two days on it. But I thought it was really interesting. One thing you point out, and there's a crowd but there there are members of the crowd right you and i work on within and between group and individual differences and

things like that so maybe talk a little bit about that that big difference between hey there's a crowd and there are members of the crowd and part of it we just talked about right you don't just shoot at the crowd absolutely and so you know it's it's it's a bit like the way we are trying to describe the community, right? When we say the community wants this, it assumes that we're all one, right? We all share the same perspective. We all come from the same backgrounds and we want the same things. And that is simply not true. the same things. And that is simply not true. And, you know, when you think about a crowd, it's just a smaller community and the same principle holds, you know, you have various people who are often there, they might all be there generally for the same reason, but even then you can't say that that's true. Right. So you think about a baseball stadium crowd, just to use the stadium example we were talking about earlier and say, you know, everybody's there to watch the baseball game. Well, if you've, if you've ever studied stadium crowds, you know that that's not true, right? Because you're going to have, you're going to

have a proportion of people in there who are like me, who are there for the, the, the beer and the peanuts. Right. And so everybody, when you, when you think about a crowd, you're right. It's collections of people. Now, very rarely are they individuals, right? Most people attend events. So when we're dealing with crowds, most people attend events or go to places with a small group of other people, right? Whether it's one or two or three others. Very rarely do you find individuals, or at least it's less common. I shouldn't say very rarely, but it's less common i shouldn't say very rarely

but it's less common that people just go to things on their own they're usually with another group of people and this is why if you ever have looked at and i'm sure you have read them the crowd dynamics modeling where they try to model evacuations or they'll try to model movement of crowds in very specific locations with physical obstacles and see how crowds move. And they kind of treat it like water, like water molecules. But in reality, those models are never perfect. And the reason for that is because, again, we're with these small groups of people. So even in a crowd panic situation, I'm trying to stay close, you know, to two or three other people that I know. And that changes the dynamic. We're not

all acting as independent actors, right? You have these smaller groups of individuals within a crowd. And so it's something to consider when we're trying to manage the movement of crowds, when we're trying to message to crowds, that people are often acting within small groups within those crowds as well. I think that's a huge observation and one that's probably actionable in a lot of ways. And it's interesting how you work that in. I actually have a big, you know, my little card here with questions on it. One of them was around agent-based AI, right? We worked with another university a little bit on that for active shooter, killer, you know, active attacker.

And there's just infinite number of variables. As you know, you can change. And one of the faculty from UCL over in London came over and spent some time with us. But so maybe a little bit more about that. That's fascinating and usable that this crowd is moving and flowing and doing things, but it's not like you say, 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 dots. It is, but yet many of those dots are connected and clumped together. And so they're going to move in a way that they're trying to keep contact and connected to each other. And I wonder how that,

anything spring to mind, how that might be useful for either side, a law enforcement practitioner that's trying to understand to protect the group overall and what they're trying to do and or our practitioners as well that are trying to protect a place

and their people in and around that place? Anything spring to mind? That's a great, great question. And I think we, it deserves further consideration and probably a lot more study. But I can tell you that it comes back to our last conversation together, where really things are networked, right? We talked about places being networked, but people are certainly networked. And it's interesting, I've seen a few video clips of some person in authority trying to issue some sort of command for somebody to do something, and that person isn't doing it, and they don't understand why, right? And it's because that person is waiting for somebody else or is looking for somebody else or is panicked because, you know, they can't find their bearings and they don't know where the other people they've come with have gone. And so, you know, I think it's important, you know, in any type of emergency

situation to consider how people are networked and consider that people are likely wanting to move in those groups. And if you attempt to break those groups apart, we can run into issues. People are less likely to be cooperative or voluntarily comply with what we're asking them to do. So when we're thinking about how we want to move people, we need to take that dynamic into consideration. No, that's significant. One of the calls, another one I just debriefed, I think it was two days ago.

And these guys are in their buildings, right? These are big, big retail stores. And they're in a place where they just have not yet opened those stores because of the COVID-19 situation. And so they're boarded up. So they boarded them up. And one thing they noticed compared to their colleagues at some other chains, okay, competitors, but as I think you and I've talked about in the LP, AP world, competitors, but as I think you and I've talked about in the LPAP world, we worked very, very closely together, even the most intense competitors. But they had two different tactics, because what happens, they were observing this, right? This is just anecdotal right now,

but they noticed that particularly the crime crews or the ones they identified as Antifa, particularly the crime crews or the ones they identified as Antifa because they had Antifa on their mask or something else, those people would peel out of the crowd and they would go to a location that was boarded up. OK, and most of them were and are. And this is in New York City. But they would go to the ones that they thought were vacant. Right. They weren't as interested if they saw people in, if they saw one, they might. If they saw just a group, they didn't seem to. So one chain, their people,

they had them come out of the store and kind of stand in close proximity to each other. And like you're saying, they formed their own little group around the store. They weren't actually, of course, going to tackle looters and rioters coming their way that were trying to be violent. But they just had that presence, that show of force, but yet mostly to show, hey, we're with this and we're here.

They didn't seem to have any problems. Their stores got hit because they had the same plywood or particle board and boarding. But that case, they came with breaching tools and an interesting dynamic. You probably know that some of these groups pre-staged these brick piles all over the place, all across the country, almost simultaneously, as well as, I guess, some breaching tools like wrecking or crowbars. But they didn't know they were inside. So they started trying to pull the boards off. They were able, with loudspeakers, to say, hey, we're in here. There's a ton of us. We're, you know, this and that.

Those people took off from that location. Any thoughts around we're trying to figure out ways that we can help communicate, hey, we're increasing your effort. We're increasing your perceived risk of detection, and we're going to try and reduce your potential reward and things like that, right, under situational crime prevention. Yeah, absolutely. I'm trying to think of, I mean, certainly the more we can manage those dimensions, right, the more effort,

the greater the risk, the more we can reduce the rewards and eliminate some of those provocations and excuses, the more effective we tend to be. And I have a secondary framework that I developed out of working on crowd-related issues with the situational crime prevention framework that I found really useful from the psychological perspective. And especially when you're dealing with diverse crowds where you might have some of the individuals that you were describing inside of a larger crowd. Because again, when we apply these crime science principles, we apply them across the board because we try not to distinguish between who is the troublemaker and who is not necessarily. We just assume everybody has the potential to do bad things. And so we're going to change that. We're going to alter those dynamics so

that we just make doing bad things a less attractive opportunity. But the other thing that I found really helpful, especially when we're trying to roll out some sort of procedure or policy, and we want people to buy into it and to listen to our messaging and to do things voluntarily, is this model that I use when I'm training crowd venue managers that we call RDFC. And RDFC stands for Reasonable,arming, focused, and consistent. And it goes something like this. Here's the Cliff Notes version. So we often, you know, if we can allow people just to be as they are, that's great. But every once in a while, you know, we need to put restrictions on behavior. And so when we think about those restrictions,

the first thing we need to ask ourselves is, you know, is this a reasonable request? Or could we get them to behave in a manner that's appropriate, you know, using some, asking them to do something else that's perceived by people as being more reasonable, right? So we start there and we say, okay, what will people perceive to be a reasonable request? I think right now is a great example of how we have to think through these things because of the mask ordinances, right? So some people see that as absolutely reasonable and other people see it as some sort of infringement on their rights. I know we've been seeing this across the country. So there's the reasonable aspect. And let's assume that we have to ask them to do something, like wear a mask in a store,

right? The second thing that we want to think about is not just what we're asking them to do, but how we ask them to do it. Just like we were taught when we were little, right? It's not just what you say, it's how you say it. And that's the disarming aspect of it. You know, people, you and I have probably studied this in our past at length, but the whole verbal judo, right, that they would teach law enforcement officers. I'm sure that you were exposed to that back in the day, right? So how can we be clever with our words so that when we have to ask somebody to do something, we do so in a way that's disarming, isn't causing people, you causing people to react negatively to

whatever it is that we're asking them to do. And then in that sense, when we've asked them to do something, we've done it in a disarming way. We can't always please everybody, right? So sometimes people are going to cause trouble, cause problems, and continue to resist and continue to not be compliant. So when that happens, we continue to not be compliant. So when that happens, we have to be extremely focused. And this goes back to our crowds and our groups. So, you know, when we do have to intervene, when we do have to remove an individual,

when we do have to target a particular, you know, issue, person, condition, we have to be very, very focused in our approach. And that last dimension is when we're doing this, it is so important to be consistent in our approach because we need to be able to set expectations. You know, when I walk into a retail store, especially the larger chains, I have a very specific script in my head, right, of exactly, you know, I know the store, I know the layout, I, you know, I'm familiar with, you know, the employees, even how they dress, right? You can pick out an employee because you know that that employee wears a certain type of polo, a certain type of pants. There's a lot of consistency and consistency promotes, you know, it reinforces predictability. And predictability is really important when it

comes to gaining compliance, getting people to do what it is that we need them to do, right? Because if they perceive us as being erratic and unpredictable, they're more likely to behave in the same way. So just like those situational crime prevention dimensions where we can alter opportunities, as we're doing that if we can be high on those four dimensions of being reasonable disarming focused and consistent this really gives legitimacy to the policies and procedures we use to to try to manage behavior more locations no i think you know good i love and all these acronyms or models as you know are typically very useful for all of us um to us remember, but help us understand the concept and how it's going to play out.

Even though in the heat of the battle, we may not remember all of it, but we might remember, hey, reasonable, consistent, things like that, that they might call upon or we might not heed. Absolutely. And I really feel like these models are extraordinarily helpful in the planning phases for these things. You know, we have, when we have a policy for dealing with a non-compliant guest, right? We would want to look at that policy and say, is there a way to make this more reasonable, more disarming, more focused, more consistent? more reasonable, more disarming, more focused, more consistent. And then that better prepares us for instances like this, where there's just a lot of chaos and we're doing the best we can, and we're making split second decisions and flying by the seat of our pants. No, it's excellent. It may be, you know, the idea of kneeling and we've seen,

you know, you can imagine watching a ton of video here in the last week and a half, trying to just understand probably in the way that sports coaches do, right, breaking down plays. We do that anyway with a lot of things that happen. And now the same thing, and there's tragically no shortage of video to watch, but things like kneeling, you know, where an officer or particularly a leader decides, you know what, I'm going to kneel. Now, I know this is polarizing. There's some practitioners who are, wait a minute, no, that's being subservient.

That's not, you know, by you doing that, you know, you're now making yourself subservient. You're not now in a position of authority. Others say, no, I'm connecting. I'm trying to humanize who we are. We represent you. We are you. We're citizens. We're just now, let's say, law enforcement officers, or in our case, asset protection personnel. So any thoughts around that connection and does that fit into your model that you were describing? Yeah, absolutely. And certainly when they take that knee, right, it's a very disarming response, right? So, you know, we're asking crowds to, you know, we're saying you can protest, but please protest peacefully.

That's the request, right? And I think most people would assume that's a really reasonable request. But the way that we make that request, do we say, you know, you must, if you're going to protest, you must protest peacefully? Or are we, you know, joining with them, showing some empathy, you know, maybe in this instance where somebody takes a knee and says, listen, you know, we're here to protect you and your rights. But, you know, we all need to stay peaceful. And you demonstrate that yourself.

That's a very, I think in many respects, very disarming. Right. And it's hard for people to get angry when they see you doing that. Right. It really takes the wind out of the sails for the people who want to, you know, target you as the enemy. So yes, absolutely. And I think you've seen it, the leadership across the country, everybody's approach is different in many different ways. And sometimes that's because the context is different. And sometimes that's because they might be adhering to these principles a bit differently. But I can tell you that all of the crowd managers that I've worked with across the country, when they adhere to these principles, when they review what it is that they're planning to do

and they reconsider and really push themselves to think harder about, you know, how to be a little bit better at this, how to get a bit more effective at doing this. It's phenomenal what we're able to do. So yeah, I think we're seeing some of this definitely in the instances that you described across the country. I think one thing that's also interesting in listening to you, but the use of drones, I had the opportunity to go over when this, I guess it's called Alt-Right, Richard Spencer spoke on campus at UF. They don't want controversy. They don't want all kinds of things to happen or be identified with anything one way or the other. But under the state law, they had to make the venue available. So they spent weeks and weeks, thought they could not have it, and then they still did. So they spent weeks and activated some mutual aid packs and had law enforcement from all over the place come in. And they organized.

But they had a couple things because I had a lot of access to understand how what was going on before during and after um but they had a lot of intelligence that they knew well are there going to be eight wing people are they going to be antifa or revcom here um who are they what they look like where are they coming from what's their chatter and all those sort of intentions what are their capabilities you know are they armed and what would they be armed with and what's their intention um in likelihood so um but i noticed a few things one the use of drones now i was thinking between you and i of course as researchers how can we get or encourage others to see if they could secure drone footage from some of these events to look at the dynamics. It's better than agent-based AI, right? Or some other modeling.

You're actually looking at that. Now, we all need a lot of variables around the context, as you're saying. There's so much different about each of the events, even though these things are probably starting the same. Hey, we're here because we would like to change some perceptions and some minds and some actual practice. That's what this is about. But we see other things.

We're here to create dissent, mistrust. We want to erode confidence and authority. We want to damage and destroy. We want to just steal stuff or whatever else it might be. But any thoughts around research that can be done in the heat of the moment or later, ex post facto here, using some of the video that we can get from drones or, of course, the media and so on? So you mean using the drones themselves to record the crowds and study them from there or to use them to identify dangerous dynamics and intervene? I think that in our case, as researchers, right, yes, after the fact, all right, did we see what was going on and then what was the, you know, the stimulus, the response, the counter stimulus and response and things like that.

If we know a little bit about what's happening, as you're saying, what I saw during the event here on campus was like you're talking about, that was to spot people that, the groups that were clumping in groups, an individual or groups that looked like they now had weapons. So we're moving aggressively toward another individual or groups.

But- Yes, and I'm not an expert in the drone realm, although I have colleagues at UNLV who've studied police use of drones extensively, and it's fascinating from a public perspective what people find acceptable and unacceptable. Sometimes it has to do with the actual design of the drone. So some are very aggressive looking, right? Like little hornets, you know, flying above you that are scary looking and others can be quite pleasing. They make them look like little happy ladybugs or something. And the reaction that people have to that is

really interesting. And related to that recently with the AI incorporation, I know out in Colorado, where there's a lot of people trying to enjoy this beautiful weather during this pandemic, obviously city officials are concerned about social distancing, even outdoors. And so they're using drones and AI to detect when people are less than six feet apart. and AI to detect when people are less than six feet apart. And then they're issuing these warnings from the drones, you know, please separate, please remain six feet apart. And I just find that fascinating. There's so much work to be done in terms of people's perceptions of that and whether or not that's effective and, you know,

how we can better leverage that technology. Yeah, no, excellent. So that's an interesting, you know, we've talked about this before as well about dosing and it's not what you do, but how you do it. And we've been working a lot on vehicles and parking lots that are there to deter or disrupt criminal activity, simultaneously maybe reassure the legitimate place users, right? The shoppers and employees and delivery people. Now, what does that look like? And so our particular live view model that we've got is steel so that we can, we've produced some different magnetic skins. So it can look like a civilian, you know, it could be yellow, it could be blue, it could be this, or it could be look

like a Gainesville police vehicle, right? It's got the badge and it looks. So we were trying to understand, you know, how does that the differential appearance, as well as the location and things like that, help them, you know, the bad guys see get inferior and the good person notice it and recognize and be reassured. So the same thing is very fascinating with the drone appearance. shirt. So the same thing is very fascinating with the drone appearance. That's fantastic. Yeah. And that's phenomenal research. I can't wait to see that when you guys come out with that. I think there's a lot to be learned with that again, because, you know, when we do have to ask people to do it, what's the most effective way to do that? And, you know, how do we gain buy-in and gain it quickly? And knowing how people think and how they perceive the tools that we're using is critical. Absolutely. So I'm trying to think, to me, these are some of the main principles we were looking at. We've heard police officers and civilians shot by somebody or somebody's in the crowd, pipe bombs that went off or pipe bombs that were placed in frozen water bottles and these types of weapons. But I think of primary concern right now for the

retailers are how do we better, it sounds terrible, armor up our locations, their locations to safeguard anybody that might be inside. And then of course, try and maintain that location intact. And we talked before this podcast how so many of these retailers were already wounded, terribly, horrifically wounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and total or mostly or partial shutdown of their business. And now this in the wake of opening and a lot of the merchandise that's stolen during looting events is not the real financial problem. It's a for sure financial hit and it creates a lot of problems with their supply chain and so on. But it's the

incredible amount of damage that's done to the facility and the cost of the rebuilding and repair is off the charts. And a real tragedy here is it looks like the majority of businesses that have been destroyed and burned and are continuing to be are locally owned. People of color and others who their dreams have been destroyed. But I know from just the chain standpoint, this could do in a couple of the ones. So any thoughts applying situational crime prevention, a little about crowd science, excuse me, within the crime science realm. Anything else, anything else, Tamara, that we should be thinking about doing, trying to better understand about crowds, individuals and small groups within

crowds, and how to maybe better deter, disrupt, or not provide incentives to protect? Sure. I, you know, in particular, I think three of our dimensions are really critical right now. One of them you just mentioned, which is effort, and you used the phrase armor up. But in general, we need to somehow secure our locations, right, so that we can minimize damage or, if possible, prevent people from entering and causing damage and causing the types of harms that ends up being very costly to the businesses,

but then has all sorts of secondary ramifications because it influences our ability to open and to keep people gainfully employed. So there's so much in terms of the effort aspect that's really helpful. Two of the other dynamics that are interesting to consider right now, and just as we move forward and we become better at thinking through these issues, obviously risk is reduced at the moment simply because masks are so acceptable, right? So you can have an army of people marching toward a facility in masks, and that's not going to be considered strange, right? Everybody's wearing masks right now. And I think we've talked about Clark McPhail

before, just an amazing crowd science expert, discusses the anonymity that people feel, obviously, when they're just within a crowd, right? Because the crowd provides cover and you can disappear into a sea of people, but now you have a sea of people that all have their face covered. And I think that this complicates the dynamics. The other thing that we might want to think about is some way to leverage that provocation mechanism, if you will, or that element of the opportunity structure. I had a friend, just as an example, who was dealing with an open air concert venue. I mean, he was really frustrated because he had a huge lawn seating area. And, you know, lawn seats, you had a really diverse crowd in those lawn seats.

You had some young people, but you also had older individuals. You know, you had children. You just had other types of vulnerable populations that might be up in these areas. And he was lamenting, he was saying to me, what can I possibly do to keep people who are trying to, I know this is very 90s, but mosh, right? Or, you know, set fires, do other types of harm away from these people. And we had talked about, and I know that this has become quite common now, but they have these sort of family zones, right? things that we played with that ended up being really interesting and highly effective was putting pictures on the outside of that tiny fence that they used to separate the family zone that would deter people who wanted to use harm. And so we called it the stroller effect, right? If you put pictures of strollers on the outside of something, these young males who were intent on,

you know, being aggressive and causing harm really wanted nothing to do with that. They didn't want to be over there near pictures of strollers. It just wasn't their thing. And so it deflected these individuals simply because of imaging that was used. solutions for your listeners at the moment. I think maybe if we think around this issue, we could come up with some really creative ideas for how we might display or change the exterior of some of our facilities or display images that make us a much less attractive location that people might want to target for these types of behaviors. I really like that a lot. And I appreciate those thoughts, Tamara. And, you know, we've been working on social media messaging to do a little bit of that persuasion, right, under the persuasion science where we're saying, hey, you understand your loved ones work here or shop here and things like that, but not really thinking visually for the actual venue or space or the

place itself and the stroller idea or the workers that are local people, not necessarily their faces that broadly, but I love that idea of communicating. And we've thought about that, even with the boarding up, this isn't a hurricane, right? So it doesn't matter what hurricane the plywood looks like, but it might, to your point, really make a difference in crowd dynamics. And one thing I would say too here as we get to the end is that a lot of the video review, I've seen some really heartening videos where local people, I saw, I believe it was a CBS,

that these groups that look like Antifa, look like it's set on one of them's backpack, but this African-American female, she jumped in front of them and she wouldn't let them approach that CBS. They were kind of getting ready to come in there, almost like wolves held at bay momentarily. And I mean, a flood of other young African-American men, young males came in and they stood side by side in front of her. And I've seen a few of these types of scenarios. I saw a young African-American man with a bullhorn or, you know, loud hand speaker down in the South Florida area. There was a group of what looked like, again, one of those outside agitator groups, the hijackers we're calling right now,

they're hijacking these, what were supposed to be peaceful demonstrations or protests. And he's going up and down telling them to disperse. You're not with us. This is not about hate. You need to move on. You need to get out of here, you know, kind of thing. So those are interesting things. Can we leverage and understand and encourage, look, there's some positive things that are going on here that probably needed to happen, but not all these people that have come in here are leveraging and taking advantage and hijacking these things. So good.

Perfect. I really appreciate that. Well, I want to thank you again. Your time is invaluable and you're in high demand because of all your expertise. And I want to thank you again, Tamara, for another fantastic episode.

I wish the best to you, to Maris, to all your expertise. And I want to thank you again, Tamara, for another fantastic episode. I wish the best to you, to Maris, to all your colleagues there and stay safe and let's stay in touch. Absolutely. You're one of my favorite people. So never, never hesitate to reach out. I will always have time to talk with you and I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Well, thank you again. And thank you, Kevin Tran, our producer, and to all of our listeners for tuning in to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast. Please let us know any questions, comments, suggestions, ideas, things that we can do to continually improve getting the translating science to practice. So everybody

be safe out there. Thank you.