Over at The Consumerist, Meg Marco says that two shoppers injured in Black Friday’s Walmart stampede are suing the police for not preventing the stampede. As is noted by some commenters, this seems likely to go nowhere, as the Supreme Court has found that the “government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.”

More interesting to me was this comment, by user geekgrrl77:

It’s amazing to me that no one here understands that stampedes aren’t caused by the actions of any single person in the crowd!

Have you ever been near the front of a standing-room only concert, when the doors open and everyone comes piling in from behind and you get pushed up against the stage? You CAN’T STOP IT (let along stand still and not trample the person in front of you), and the people in the back aren’t to blame because they can’t see what’s going on up front.

This is Walmart’s fault. Plain and simple. They needed to set up better crowd control and barriers to prevent the crowd from squishing the people up front in mass. The police couldn’t have done anything, unless they were there to organize the thing in the first place, and the individuals in the crowd had no way of stopping what was going on.

It’s easy to blame a psycho-sale-crazed consumer, but that isn’t whose at fault here, folks.

I disagree with geekgrrl77 completely here. Walmart may bear some slight burden of blame in this particular situation, but it’s the same sort of blame that an individual faces if he or she decides to walk through the bad part of town at night alone and is then mugged. There may have been some negligence in preventing the crime, but neither our hypothetical individual nor Walmart has done anything wrong.

If the government and its agents are not responsible to prevent a specific crime, how much more ridiculous is it to imply that a private entity (Walmart) is somehow responsible to have done so?

The logic that geekgrrl77 is using here is fundamentally flawed in that it completely absolves the people who took action from responsibility for their actions simply because other people were also engaged in the same action. In an extreme example, this is like saying that, if a woman is gang-raped by ten men, none of the men is responsible because they couldn’t have stopped it (any one of them is unlikely to have been able to outmuscle the others to prevent the crime, after all, and the crime was arguably prompted by the sense of power and control that came from being in such a large group, so that no single member of the group “caused” the crime to occur).

For a less distasteful example, let’s look at an application of the tragedy of the commons. Imagine a beautiful public park, in the middle of which is a three-foot pile of trash. Now, let’s imagine that, walking by, I toss a candy-bar wrapper onto the pile. Is it my fault that the pile of trash is there? Geekgrrl77, if she is consistent, would say that, no, it is the fault of, well, everyone else, as they didn’t prevent me from throwing my piece of paper onto the pile. In truth, though, while I may not be fully responsible for the existence of the pile of trash, I share as much responsibility for its existence as anyone else who contributed even a single piece of paper.

The blame in the case of the Walmart Black Friday tragedy falls on those everyone who was a member of the crowd. Individually, they are not guilty of manslaughter, but they are guilty of, at the very least, disorderly conduct.

The problem here is that a bunch of people own a very tiny share in a relatively large tragedy, which is something we as humans aren’t really capable of reconciling. A man is dead, so we think that someone must be responsible. No one in the obvious group of offenders really did anything so wrong that we feel comfortable pinning murder (or even manslaughter) on them, so we look for other scapegoats. Walmart, being a large, inhuman entity, is the obvious one, though the police force (as an abstract, not the individual officers at the scene) obviously serves the role for some people. In fact, though, it’s just a bad situation where a collection of individual bad actions (on the part of the mob members) added up to a consequence that was, sadly, much worse than the individuals’ specific actions would have seemed to have indicated.