The Crowd as a Threat

This chapter examines how dominant assumptions about crowds shaped policing by portraying them as irrational, volatile, and dangerous. From the late nineteenth century, thinkers such as Taine, Sighele, Tarde, and Le Bon cast crowds as pathological threats to order, reflecting elite fears of democracy, socialism, and revolution. These ideas, rooted in wider upheavals and repression in Europe, defined classical crowd psychology as a framework that delegitimised collective action and justified control. This chapter traces the mid-twentieth-century revival of these assumptions in experimental social psychology, where Festinger, Zimbardo, and others advanced deindividuation models portraying crowds as sites of lost reason and morality. Despite contradictory evidence, these theories resonated with conservative anxieties about protest and disorder in the 1960s, entrenching their influence. It then shows how classical assumptions became institutionalised in police training, most clearly in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Field Force Operations Student Guide 2016, which echoes Le Bon and Zimbardo in depicting crowds as irrational and contagious. This chapter argues that classical crowd psychology was less scientific analysis than political technology, shaping law, policy, policing, and media portrayals. It concludes by calling for critical reappraisal and alternative models that recognise the rationality and agency inherent in collective behaviour.