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Earlier this week Gregg and Marcy described their experiences of the massive public safety failure DC’s incompetent police force and the incompetent Inaugural planners inflicted on hundreds of thousands of guests they’d invited to Washington for January 20.

After nearly a decade, the large US social justice protests have pretty much dwindled away. While they were more frequent, organizers had a chance to compare a whole bunch of cities’ crowd control capacitities. On the crowd control learning curve, DC seems stuck well behind NYC, LA, and even LA’s suburb Pasadena.

Crowd control planning is algebra with monitors and — if it comes to it — people with barricades and horses. The Mall holds X people (finite number:

The mall isn’t getting bigger and Americans sure aren’t getting smaller). The number of access points onto the Mall hasn’t changed. Allowing people to move onto the Mall required some genius to calculate how many folks the Mall held (1.2 million?), divide that by the number of access points, and then do the simple math to determine how many people need to move through an access point in an hour to allow the place to fill up by showtime. Every year in little old Pasadena, California the Rose Parade – with some searches — brings well over one million people into a tightly controlled area within a matter of hours.

The Rose Bowl does this once every year (with searches), as does Santa Anita race track dozens of weekends of a year, both hosting a little over 100,000 guests. Even though the Inauguration may draw ten times (or twenty times) that number, at every individual access point the calculation is the same: how many people need to move through per hour to keep the crowd flowing?

Knowing how many folks have to pass through a checkpoint per hour to allow the crowd to move into the event allows competent event planners to plan how many people and search stations to deploy at each entry point. Competent event planners who care about public safety will order their uniformed staff to show up early enough to let people in, rather than stay in bed (or line up four deep on a parade route) while crowds filled with out-of-towners lacking proper cold weather gear pile up in deadly cold outside of understaffed checkpoints.

Competent event planners choose lines that are – well – linear, rather than intersecting. Competent event planners choose to open access points as early as required to allow the crowds to move into the event site beofre the event starts. Competent crowd control never moves more density into overcrowded areas.

Compared to NYC, LA, and Seattle, the DC cops’ crowd control has been incompetent for years. With the Inauguration’s bottomless security budget and the 50:1 crowd:cop ratio, DC had the resources to accomplish the task. For whatever reason, they chose to deploy those resources three and four deep along the parade route, yet failed to deploy adequate "gate check" resources.

From a public health perspective, prolonged cold exposure in underprepared crowds can be even more catastrophic than prolonged heat exposure. We had a nifty chance to compare during the "A16" April 2000 IMF protests in DC: blazing sun (dehydration and "heat exhaustion") one day: snow on the ground the next day (hypothermia and frostbite). Cold injuries are far easier to prevent, however: heating stations do nicely. Of course, that requires crowd planners who put public safety first.

For people who’ll be in the cold for hours, keeping them standing increases the burn rate of finite energy stores they’ll need to stay warm. It’s also rude. Though it didn’t happen this time, the DC Police’s repeated failures to protect the civil rights and the public safety of large crowds can also kill. I hope Gregg’s post, Marcy’s post, and growing public attention finally move DC to dump the dullards who keep screwing up competent crowd control and hire folks from places that get it right.