Police have 'new' containment tactic!

An article in the Evening Standard today (22nd March) reports Assistant Commissioner Lynne Owens (in charge of Public Order policing at the Met) as saying that the Met have a new containment tactic that 'has not been trialled yet' because the last 2 demos where it was in place were peaceful, but they may use it if there's trouble on the TUC demo this sat 26th March. Now I currently have no idea what this new tactic might be (maybe a 'super kettle with bells on'?!), but articles like this are not particularly encouraging as they just emphasise the classic ideological position the authorities have to protests and show to me that the Police are gearing up for trouble. I worry that providing briefings like this beforehand risk any disorder becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy, but we'll see what happens this saturday. Link to story follows below;
  
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23934441-police-put-firms-on-riot-alert-for-tuc-anti-cuts-march-by-250000.do

Panic buying of iodine in response to Japanese nuclear crisis

The following article on Channel 4 News web-site illustrates the concept of panic-buying, which I have referred to in earlier blogs.

http://www.channel4.com/news/japan-iodine-supplies-dwindle-amid-radiation-fears

There was also Colin Blakemore from the Medical Research Council (MRC) on the programme talking about this concept. He spoke about how while it may not be medically necessary to take iodine if one is not in the immediate vicinity of a radiation leak, it is not necessarily irrational if one considers it in the context that there is a widespread lack of public trust in the nuclear industry. Therefore, people may not always believe messages that are put out that downplay the threat of radiation contamination (even if they're true!). This is clearly a problem, but I would argue one of the public not having any trust in the nuclear industry (and perhaps also government), rather than people displaying irrational behaviour. If I thought I was at risk of nuclear contamination, then I would go straight out and get some iodine for me and my family. Thankfully, because I am based in the UK I don't feel the need to do so at the moment (but maybe I'll eat  more seaweed for a while!)   

Japan- fragile or resilient?

I've been trawling through some of the footage of the tsunami that has just hit Japan, and found a rather interesting but also strangely idiosyncratic article by Hugh Levinson from the BBC;

'Japan: A fragile country at the mercy of nature'- 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9422281.stm

Given the title, one would perhaps expect the story to focus on the fragility of Japan. However, while the word 'panic' is mentioned once, it is used to describe the journalist's own internal feelings, rather than any mass panic of those affected. He also mentions the term resilience in the following way;

"The city of Tokyo has shown extraordinary resilience. In March 1945, a couple of decades after the great earthquake, American B29s dropped incendiary bombs on the city of wooden houses. The resulting firestorm killed 100,000 people in the course of a single night. Waiting for the "big one" is a part of Japanese life".

Therefore, this begs the question of why does the title focus on fragility, while the body of the article focuses on resilience? It seems here that even when the coverage of emergencies rightly points out the incredible resilience that people can show in response to disasters, it is all too easy to slip back into the pervasive myth of vulnerability, even when the material presented suggests the opposite!

New Camden Journal article

An article on my work on crowds has just been published by the New Camden Journal, and is available in e-copy via;
http://www.islingtontribune.com/reviews/features/2011/mar/feature-popular-uprising-academics-take-media-portrayals-recent-protests-h

 and pdf of how it appears in print;
http://eu.vocuspr.com/ViewAttachment.aspx?EID=OP0Y29cs0ydekJivJUJbsF5/6U/cpNxEtbHXaZhF6Is=

Some thoughts on the closing statements of the 7/7 Inquests

As the 7/7 inquests come to a close, the BBC have published an article on-line about the people who helped others after the 4 explosions on London’s transport system on July 7th 2005; 'London bombings: unsung heroes of 7 July'; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12154040

There are some moving stories about the bravery of people who often risked their lives to help their fellow passengers (who were mostly complete strangers) in scenes of horrific devastation after the suicide bombers detonated their devices. However, I worry that the tone of the article risks supporting the usual misperception that co-operation and altruism is the exception rather than the rule in mass emergencies. Furthermore, reports like this imply that were it not for a few isolated individuals holding everyone together, then mass panic would undoubtedly ensue- something that almost never happens in disasters.

The article mentions the bystander effect (a psychological process whereby people can be reluctant to help others, because they don't want to get involved, or feel a sense of diffusion of responsibility in a crowd) to explain why people can ignore others in need.  However, while there is a lot of experimental evidence to show that bystander apathy can be recreated in the laboratory, studies of behaviour in real-life emergencies is much less conclusive.  Much work has been done by colleagues of mine into the bystander effect, such as Mark Levine (http://psychology.exeter.ac.uk/staff/index.php?web_id=Mark_Levine) who disputes simplistic interpretations of the bystander effect. He argues that we should instead focus on the situations in which we intervene to help others, and has produced a large body of evidence to show that if we feel a sense of shared identity and hence empathy with others, then co-operation is much more likely. Therefore, rather than bemoaning ‘human nature’ as inherently selfish, perhaps we should look instead at how we can encourage people to help others in need.

The work that I did with colleagues into crowd behaviour in mass emergencies (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/affiliates/panic/) did focus a lot on survivors’ accounts of 7/7, and we found that altruism was the norm and not the exception. We argued that this was because the emergency created a sense of shared fate amongst the survivors, which encouraged co-operative and not selfish behaviour. This is not to say that we don’t recognize that there were some incredibly heroic people who helped others in the aftermath of the explosions (I felt privileged to have met a few during my research in this area, and was moved and inspired by their accounts). However, the general mood of the situation (relative calm and/or shock amongst survivors rather than mass hysteria) meant that those brave individuals were able to step forward and encourage general co-operation through their actions. This was because they were seen as representative of this calm norm and so were effective in helping others and encouraging general co-operation amongst survivors. Had there been an atmosphere of mass panic amongst survivors, I doubt that such brave actions would have been so influential amongst others. Therefore, I would argue that when general co-operation occurs in mass emergencies (and when it is physically possible to do so, it generally happens), it is not in spite of the crowd, it is because of it. Therefore, emergency management strategies should take this into account, as survivors may be able to provide vital help in the time before the emergency services reach survivors in the aftermath of future emergencies.