Just come across an interesting article that explores the Love Parade Disaster in Duisberg, Germany in August 2010, where 21 people died and over 500 were injured in a fatal crowd crush. The authors conclude that the tragedy did not happen because of selfish 'mass panic' or a stampede, but because of a phenomenon they call 'crowd-quake' where physical pressures in the crowd created a domino effect whereby people fell over and got crushed by the sheer density of other crowd members.
Therefore, crowd safety management strategies should focus on how to prevent such potentially fatal pressure building up rather than relying on out-dated approaches that assume crowds will behave selfishly and 'panic'- a concept which seems increasingly unreliable in the wake of this report.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428367/crowd-quakes-were-a-key-factor-in-loveparade/
http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.5856
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