Crowds and Violence: Negotiating with Mobs

Abstract

The crowd was more like a mob now, but he saw at the second glance that it was what he thought of as a plumcake mob. It doesn't take many people to turn a worried anxious crowd into a mob. A shout here, a shove there, something thrown here … and with care, every hesitant, nervous individual is being drawn into a majority that does not, in fact, exist. Terry Pratchett 1