Yeah I know there were people calling the police earlier to inform about the potential danger. I just mean, if you are one of the crowd's there on the day, are you not responsible at all to anticipate such accident may happen? If at 6pm you know the crowd is getting out of control and an accident is impending, can you not do something about it at least on your part? Or must you wait until the police comes only you'll do something about it otherwise it's all the authorities' fault. Sure they should've disperse staff earlier not arguing on that, just adding on at the meantime what were the crowds still thinking trying to squeeze if it is already very obvious that the crowd is getting out of hand? (This is unless they were already stuck inside and unable to get out)
I get what you are saying and if you want to go down the route of individual responsibility by using this event and writing about it you are raising awareness and educating specially young audience.
Let us not forget that most of the people in the crowd where super young, under mild or strong alcohol influence, that had absolutely NO thought that anything wrong could happen. Easy to blame them but when you were twenty did you ever think about crowd surge or stampedes? I knwo i didn’t. That awareness came much later. So even by identifying what went wrong and publicizing it the awareness spreads and they will be always in heads of young people’s head, even those that are 10 today ‘be aware of Itaewon like tragedy’. I still think that those responsible for public order where ill prepared, as even they did not believe that something like this can happen. Even today in some other country there is 10 year old who never heard of this tragedy and will repeat the same mistake when they are 18 or 20, tipsy and giddy withe excitement. The only thing that stands between him/her and tragedy are well organized adults. Yes it was tragic accident, yes they were those who acted unwise in this crowd but most of all there are failed those responsible for public order and devastated parents who are now thinking if they could have/should have / would have done better.
If the attendee is especially a korean familiar of itaewon and the possible crowd on festivals like this, they definitely have the freedom and certainly the responsibility to take precaution for their own life's sake, more than the authorities should frankly. Of course no one would want to attend parties worrying that they might be stepped to death but I certainly hope incidents like this would be a lesson to all to think of their own lives and others first, esp to their loved ones. No one is single-handedly to be blamed here everyone shares some responsibility and no one should feel guilty for not doing more on the day either. Take it as a lesson, learn from it and move on.
They are not entirely wrong here. some responsibility is on the public. There has been many large gatherings like this in and out of confined spaces many times without incident with and without crowd control. Unfortunately there things happen. It's somewhat like a stadium entrance. I made the entrance as wide as a city bus. But still people crowd that entrance and get jammed in it. Is it my fault for this? Or is that on the public for not exercising common sense? Not everyone in these crowds are responsible as they are at the mercy of the flow of people. But some of the people who began the cascade of events bear some responsibility. Notice how everyone in many countries crowd push and charge to get in a train or bus station to board the transport daily yet nobody bats an eye to the chance that crowds are dangerous. Its only now after this incident people are pausing, despite incidents like this happening before though these are very very rare. You can change the world all you want but you can't edit out stupidity of certain people or their clumsy nature and when those two collide at the worst moment you end up with this. You can go look at the billions of times you seen thousands of people crowded shoulder to shoulder anywhere for any reason with or without crowd control and NOTHING happened. This was a unfortunate chain of events that lead up to this. Not everything can be made safe there's only soo much shit you can kid proof
Yeah, with the increased frequencies of fatal accidents like this happening, I think it would be more helpful for authorities to have more training or more enforcement in anticipating crowds like this. That being said, authorities are only made of humans and if crowds keep increasing and challenging their capacity then really there's only so much they can do, and only so much the public can put the blame on authorities. Just look at that poor cop the other day who's suffering through PTSD just because he was guilty for not saving more people had he brought a loud speaker. The onus and responsibility of one's life should not be placed on the authorities entirely especially since it's not an event that was forced to attend by them.
Unpopular opinion: while the authorities have responsibility to ensure better control measures in a situation like that, the crowd and public and themselves should have some responsibility themselves when they approach a crowd like this on top of a pandemic. I'm sure there are people who made such decisions as well and left. May all victims rest in peace and hopefully things like this won't happen again.
I don’t think you are getting the point, it’s not about blaming the individual police officer who only did their job and is traumatized too (no one in Korea is doing that) is about pointing out neglectful administrative choices taken this year. Itaewon has had almost double the crowd in past Halloween weekends. It begs the question why didn’t this happen then? Well when you look at the administration and the police surveillance specifically there for crowd management the answer is clear. This year they didn’t send nowhere near enough police to be there as any large event would have. Imagine how horrible of a choice it was to be so short of staff that you were getting calls 5 hours before from that very place warning you and you couldn’t send in anyone at that very moment. Could you imagine if at 6 they had sent in police and not at 10 ??? To me it is clear it would have been prevented. Also this is isn’t some random street it is one of the primary alleys that connects the subway to the city. It always anticipates heavy foot traffic which is why I’m the past this street specifically was more watched by police. I mean the list goes on of things that administration should have done to prevent this. The facts are there, wide and clear. To expect huge crowds and have such a shortage of staff is irresponsible regardless of “if people pushed” or if “people where dumb” or whatever happened inside the crowd, a police officer arriving at an active tragedy won’t look at what happened and say “well that looks like their fault so I’m not gonna do anything “ obviously not, they are there to help regardless. It is clear to me that the administration should be held accountable for not having anywhere near the protocol to ensure a safe environment.