Events that attract large crowds can be very scary places, and inexperienced marshalling can make things go from bad to worse...I was once caught in a small scale crush at a music festival once, a very very scary experience.
Very true indeed. Back in the 80's I was a special constable. Back then, we were used extensively at events such as carnivals, festivals, etc. Our general "training" for dealing with traffic control and crowds etc was pitiful! Worse still, we'd get little or no briefing for each event we went to. It was a matter of just turning up and doing what we were told, i.e. stand at junction x to direct traffic or stand at gate y to help make sure people didn't get in without a ticket. We had no briefing as to our role in an emergency. More often that not, there wouldn't be enough radios to go round so we'd be lucky to have 1 radio between 2 or 3 of us.
Once, I turned up to the local agricultural show to find I was the "officer in charge" - yes, there were NO regular police officers there, and just because I was the longest serving special (3 years and a couple of hundred hours of service), I was "in charge" of about a dozen other specials and a handful of traffic wardens. It really was just a case of muddling through and hoping nothing went wrong. Yes, I know a local agricultural show was ultra low risk, but we still had a few hundred cars to manage on local roads and a few thousand people/competitors to deal with.
But the worst was at a local football match. OK, yes, it was a non league team with no history of problems and relatively small fan numbers. Specials had never been required at the local stadium and I'd never been as a spectator, so I had no idea as to layout, exits, etc. The usual "police" attendance was a couple of bobbies in the ground and a traffic car driving around close by to watch for illegal parking etc. One week, the local station was short staffed as all spare officers had gone to Blackpool for a political conference. Specials had been requested to help cover the Tuesday night football match (which turned out to be an early stage cup match) and myself and another special had volunteered to turn out for it. We turned up at the station to sign in and expected some kind of briefing or allocation to work with regulars, but the only "officer" was an acting sergeant who just told us to walk down to the ground and mingle a bit - yes, that was the only briefing we had! When we turned up, it was bedlam, I later found out that the attendance was 5,000 against a normal turnout of 500 and 5,000 was the ground's capacity. So it was full. We radio'd the acting sergeant to tell him, but he just told us to radio back if anything went wrong!! Luckily, nothing did go wrong, but I really shudder to think what could have happened!