In ten days, it will be exactly one year since more than 150 people were killed in the crowd crush in the Itaewon area of Seoul, South Korea while Halloween celebrations were taking place. As Halloweekend festivities at USC approach, it’s time we talk about what led to the tragic incident in Itaewon: a lack of crowd control.

Crowd crushes occur when too many people are packed in a confined space, causing individuals in the crowd to fall and even suffocate. G. Keith Still, a crowd safety expert and visiting professor of crowd science at the University of Suffolk, told The Washington Post that crowd crushes are like a “domino effect.”

“The whole crowd falls over as one, and if you’re in a confined space, people then can’t get up again,” Still said. 

Proper security management, safety precautions and identification of potential hazards can prevent these tragedies from occurring. Discover magazine reported that “many venues and event planners don’t include crowd management in their preparations,” despite deadly crowd crushes at events such as Travis Scott’s Astroworld music festival in 2021, where 10 people died from compression asphyxia and hundreds were injured. 

Though at a smaller scale, these unmanageable crowds can be seen at concerts and parties at USC. Tali Duckworth, a junior majoring in trumpet performance, said USC’s 2022 Springfest concert — which was headlined by singer Dominic Fike — was her “craziest concert-going experience.”

“They just kept letting people in and kept letting people in. There were no distinct pathways that people could exit if needed,” Duckworth said. “It was just so dense with the amount of people that it was really difficult to leave or enter.”

Luckily, crowd density is a quantifiable measure that can be used to predict and analyze crowd crush incidents. Mehdi Moussaïd, a researcher in crowd behavior at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, told The Washington Post following the Itaewon incident that “there were many people, too many people in relation to the available space. [This is] measured by density, so the number of people per square meter.”

Duckworth also said that in her experience, crowds can get overwhelming at fraternity parties. 

“I went to a lot of parties my freshman year, but I kind of got sick of it because of [the lack of] crowd control my sophomore and now junior year here,” she said. “You do see [crowd control] at frats at tailgates … They try to manage it in the front. But I know certain ones have gates, and people try to push their way through.”

Some organizations do say they have policies to manage the capacity of the parties they host. The University Park Interfraternity Council — which is made up of the fraternities that have disaffiliated from USC — writes in its public guidelines for social events, “Attendance at events with alcohol … must not exceed local fire or building code capacity of the chapter/organizational premises or host venue.” 

Parties that aren’t affiliated with Greek life run into the same issues. Val Huerta, a junior majoring in history, recounted her experience at a party hosted in a small three-room apartment. She said that around 40 to 50 people were in attendance.

“There was one point where we just didn’t move a lot because there wasn’t the space to move around … It was just so overcrowded,” Huerta said. “With everyone drunk and water or alcohol over the floor, that was not safe.”

Students at USC should have the right to attend safe parties with respect to space capacity. Much of the responsibility falls on the hosts to plan ahead and have procedures in place to manage the attendants of a party. Event organizers should do risk assessments of a venue, Still said, to know its capacity and manage the flow of people coming in and out. 

Martyn Amos, a professor at Northumbria University who studies crowd science, said that these risk assessments are necessary to prevent history from repeating. 

“The general point is that these incidents will keep happening so long as we don’t put in place proper crowd-management processes that anticipate, detect and prevent dangerously high crowd densities,” Amos said in a statement to The Washington Post.

Preventative measures are essential, but removing oneself from an unsafe mass gathering — if possible — is vital. If in a crowd crush, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends attendees put their hands in front of their chest like a boxer and work their way diagonally toward the edge of the crowd. This Halloween, let’s all stay safe before things get spooky.