Riot gear and crowd psychology
In this article found on co.design, the author discussed how polices’ riot gears actually increases the likelihood for a protesting crowd to be more violent and how police forces in Britain has adopted to this idea. The article started with the protest happened in Ferguson last year and how the armed local polices and armor vehicles have become a common background in those reports. This trend of arming local police forces with heavy aggressive equipment has raised concern even in the Whitehouse and President Obama even issued a comprehensive review on that matter. The author then shifts to discuss a commonly held psychological theory on crowds which believes that people in a crowd will “soon lose their individuality and becomes suggestible to the aggressive behavior around them”. This theory can be viewed as a case of information cascade where people in the crowd receives input from others around him. When violent actions start to happen here and there from the most violent individuals in the crowd, those slightly less violent individuals will start to join. Eventually the information start to cascade and even those who are not violent will join the crowd.
However researchers in Britain concluded that the riot gears have an effect to unite the protesters. Those aggressive images of the police can make the peaceful protesters form a kinship with the violent ones, thus making them more likely to join the violent actions. When Britain adapted a new graded intervention approach which limits the presence of armed police only when necessary, the results are impressive. In most cases the peaceful protestors will even stop the violence on their own accord. The finding reveals that the “mob mentality” will not always be accurate, and the information cascade model will be affected by individual’s surroundings.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3034902/evidence/if-cops-understood-crowd-psychology-theyd-tone-down-the-riot-gear