The Night JFK Airport Went Mad

The Night JFK Airport Went Mad - Hit & Run : Reason.com:
"It seemed like a major story at first, and then it seemed like one of those news-of-the-weird tales that shuttle through Facebook for a day or two and then get forgotten.
Sunday night there were reports of gunshots in two terminals at New York's JFK Airport.
Fear swept through the crowds, and the areas were evacuated; eventually it turned out that no one had fired any weapons after all.
An odd interlude, made odder by the fact that something similar had happened at a mall in North Carolina the day before, but not the sort of news-dominating event that an actual attack with perps and corpses would have been.
But it was a big story.
It was a burst of hysteria that shows our capacity to generate our own terror even in the absence of actual terrorists, especially when the authorities are actively spreading the flames.
I recommend reading David Wallace-Wells' vivid account of that night at JFK, and not just because it's a gripping dispatch from a writer who happened to be there when the fear took hold.
Decades of sociological research have shown that, no matter how many Hollywood clichés to the contrary you may have seen, it is rare for a disaster to produce a mass panic; spontaneous cooperation and emergent order are the norm.
But there is little spontaneous cooperation or emergent order in Wallace-Wells' story—not until the apparent danger has passed:
After that second stampede, out on the tarmac, passengers moved in to comfort and inform each other, as best they could.
Those who've lived through real disasters and those who study them often talk about the improvised communities of support that spring up in real time to help.
But last night, in a false disaster, it took the complete passing of a threat before that variety of kindness sprang up.
Why?
We'll need more than one man's account before we can get anything approaching a full answer to that question.
But one theme running through Wallace-Wells' report is that the people policing the airport intervened in heavy-handed ways that made the situation much worse.
"Not only did police and security fail to prevent the spectacle of mob hysteria," he writes at one point; "on some level, given the way they pressed a hysterical crowd right back into a compressed space, they staged it."
There is also this:
Read on!