He sees a guy to his left with a baseball bat waiting for him. Maybe he thinks there are more waiting for him. He doesn’t want to run the gauntlet. He accelerates to avoid being hit. He’s scared s**tless. He runs into the crowd. He’s still scared s**tless. He backs up and gets the hell out of there. (a possible scenario)
Something like that is how it looks to me. It looks like panic. And of course this fits with Lorenz’s report that the officers said he was scared, not malicious. This is the simplest and most plausible angle, I think.