Industry Insights: The 5 Most Common Event Security Mistakes
When the doors open and the crowds pour in, the last thing you want to worry about is whether your event is secure. From concerts to conferences, festivals to fundraisers, ensuring the safety of attendees, staff, and assets is paramount. Yet, even with the best intentions, event organizers often fall prey to crucial security missteps that can have devastating consequences.
In this article, we’ll expose the 5 most common event security mistakes that can leave your organization vulnerable — and provide expert insights on how to avoid them.
INSUFFICIENT RISK ASSESSMENT
Failing to identify potential security threats and vulnerabilities is one of the biggest mistakes an event professional can make. We must consider all possible variables and threats. Failure to prepare can lead to major security incidents, resulting in harm to both people and property. One of the most recent incidents, and a great example of this, is the Copa America Final at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, FL on July 14, 2024. If you are unfamiliar with the incident, during the Copa America Final, before gates opened to let fans in, over 7,000 unticketed fans rushed the southwest side of the stadium, overpowering security and law enforcement in the area. This caused the game to be delayed by 80 minutes and many fans sustained minor injuries.
Let’s break down the insufficient risk assessment that resulted in an uncontrollable issue. During the planning phases, a conversation should have been had about both the mixing or intermingling of opposite fan bases, as well as about fans without tickets. While it’s not a new concept to the US, many international matches have seen a purposeful limiting of fan entry locations. Typically, one team’s fan base would have one half of the stadium entrances to use, while the other team’s fan base would have the opposite side of stadium entrances. This is a preventative measure to help keep fans from intermingling and having the opportunity to taunt one another or disrupt the flow of ingress. This only works with advanced notification systems, deliberate ticketing preparation, proper game day signage, and event staff actively working to direct patrons to the correct entrances.
A popular method critics suggest could have prevented the Copa America Final incident is the use of Buffer Zones for ticketed patrons. This helps prevent the unticketed fans from gaining access to locations where they can overpower or outnumber the security and law enforcement. Buffer zones keep non-ticketed patrons outside the protected external workings of stadium ingress during the pre-event phases of the day. Event professionals could consider increasing the amount of unticketed patrons around the stadium to allow them to cheer for their team from afar, such as outside of the stadium on Jumbotrons, allowing them access once the majority of gates are closed and the game had started. With less gates to enter, there would be less opportunity for unticketed fans to overpower security and the security team would have an opportunity to recover from entry while preparing for a newly secured perimeter of watch party fans. Taking it a step further, organizers could then wristband non-ticketed patrons at the buffer zones to allow them watch party entry around the stadium. Keep in mind that sectioning off watch party fan areas to coincide with respective supporter stadium seating sections would be crucial to prevent intermingling outside the stadium.
INADEQUATE COMMUNICATION
Whether you’re a small venue or one of the largest, radio communication can either be your friend or your arch nemesis. (If you chuckled, you understand the pains!) Communication is one of our biggest assets as event security professionals. Your teams should be expert communicators and active listeners. One of the biggest challenges when communicating with Command Control is radio communication/ etiquette. Most often during emergencies, or even just regular event communication, staff will step on or talk over each other during transmissions. We know that communication is imperative, yet we see time and again that venues are crossing communications on a regular basis. The majority of this issue results from untrained staff, which we will cover later in this article.
One of our favorite emergency communication testing methods is essentially a game of telephone over radio. During this exercise, supervisors are brought together and explained the game ahead of time. The role they play is to make sure each of their team members gets the code word as soon as it’s given over the radio. During the event briefing, staff are (1) notified of a potential code word to be used at a random point in the event and are (2) instructed to use their notes to write down both the code word and the time they received the message. During the event, the code word is given over the radio and the time is noted. Command Control should note when all supervisors respond back to having heard the code. If some missed the call, another call should be given to make sure it’s heard. In the meantime supervisors should relay the code to their team members to follow the instructions as provided during the event briefing.
At the end, supervisors should collect each team member’s notes to review what they wrote down as directed in their instruction. It should be recorded by event managers for comparison purposes. Continued practice of this method will help staff understand why clear, concise communication is vital during emergency situations. The goal of this exercise is to see when (time) and what information is getting to specific individuals and their locations within the stadium. This should reflect how they would receive the communication in an emergency situation.
INEFFECTIVE ACCESS CONTROL
Ineffective access control is a killer to security teams. More often than not, this relates to ineffective credentialing or failure to properly train on the credential boards. While most events change types of credentials each event due to security reasons, that practice is useless without a team prepared to enforce it. The goals of credentialing have many facets, but the overall goal is to prevent certain people from accessing restricted areas. How do you prepare your team to both check and verify credentials? Do you provide credential boards to everyone? Or only those who absolutely need them? Do you post the whole credential board up on the wall near accessible locations?
While there are many ways to make sure your team is highly prepared for credential checks and verifications, we believe in some of these techniques:
Teach your team to “Check through Touch”. Feel the credential, look at the photo and the person in front of you. Stop and slow down while analyzing. Pay attention to the details. More often than not you’ll spot something off if it’s fake. It’s important for staff to call a supervisor over to verify any uncertain situations.
Everyone, even your ownership group, should have credentials—but more importantly, they should also be willing to submit to a credential check. While security teams should have photo boards and credentials boards, there is no excuse for not having your credentials, no matter how high up on the organizational ladder.
Check your access points to restricted areas. Are they conducive to allowing just one guard to keep an eye on the space? Is it a high traffic public area leading to highly restricted areas? Verify with your security teams to see if your operation could benefit from added security guards or moving their posted location. More often than not, your team on the ground has great insights.
When it comes to preparation for credentials, repetition is key. Have your teams study and take “preparation tests” or read through “notifications of changes” prior to posting. These days QR codes are easy to setup as a quick refresher on the credential board for the day. They also make for great handheld resources for team members to compare credentials with.
Access control spans far beyond credentialing, but we believe most venues can benefit from a heightened sense of security when it comes to credential preparation. This is especially true given the upcoming events like FIFA World Cup 2026 and Olympics in LA 2028. With the announcement of Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2034, the US is about to host 3 major world events in the next 10 years.
INADEQUATE STAFF TRAINING
We know the revolving door that is event industry staffing, and the vendors who employ these staff. We see the efforts taken to get team members hired, trained, and up to speed, but we don’t see those staff return when we pay minimum wage for these roles. Staff want to feel their security work means something and makes a difference. Many simply want to get licensed to leave for work at a higher paying security company. While there are many reasons the event industry staffing matrix doesn’t work, the revolving door may simply never go away.
CrowdSafe Group has chosen to provide support in the emergency training and preparation sector of this industry because we feel there isn’t enough support for the average event staff member. This is why we introduced the Trained Crowd Staff Member program, currently offered through virtual webinar by appointment only, and soon available on demand through CrowdSafeGroup.com for any event professional or event staff member across the country. We designed this training to help event staff members across the country increase their event preparedness and to be affordable compared to other programs available.
Staff emergency situational training is implemented through repetitive practice. In our experience, having staff on site during these training sessions helps visualize and experience the protocols and procedures in a controlled environment, where they can ask questions and dive into the “WHY” of emergency situations and crowd management. We offer a comprehensive online training program that covers emergency preparedness, as well as many other topics like fire, ADA and crowd management. With this training, CrowdSafe Group strives to provide cost effective emergency prep training development in our industry so that it can be available to the masses.
LACK OF CONTINGENCY PLANNING
As the old saying goes— “When you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. To be successful event planners and organizers, we must have a contingency plan for every potential situation. The key is to have a chart, or “road map” to handle each incident. Most successful organizations have an SOP for these incidents that guides them through proper steps and protocol. This helps everyone gather key stakeholders together to become important decision makers during emergency situations. This streamlines communication at a time when it is most crucial to all stakeholders.
While each scenario may be different, the majority of the time you will still have a contingency plan to follow. A contingency plan is a backup “standard protocol” for unexpected events. Have your teams trained on each contingency plan? Tabletop exercises with your management team should be a quarterly occurrence. What about your event staff? Do you bring them in for their own walk through/tabletop? Contingency planning starts at the top, but is executed by those below us, even the event staff. Make sure your event team is prepared for all the potential contingency plans going into your busy season!
It’s obvious there are a number of event security mistakes that occur beyond those covered in this article. Many of the mistakes listed above should be addressed on a regular event basis and training should be held regularly. If not, these incidents could lead to damages that organizers are held responsible for. CrowdSafe Group is here to support you by providing the insights necessary to plan for your major events and prevent these incidents from harming your organization. We are also here to support training and preparing your teams for success.
Experience the Difference. Trust the Experts. CrowdSafe Group — where safety meets sophistication.
If you liked this article, please subscribe to our newsletter! Feel free to leave a professional comment for community discussion!