Event security: Vision-setting, planning, and implementation considerations

Considerations for event security vision-setting, planning, and implementation.

Project Overview

Hamas’ October 7th attack on the Nova Music Festival in Israel and the January 1st ISIS-inspired lone actor attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans are two recent examples that highlight the security challenges–and the cost of security failures–for public events. To better understand challenges related to the production and implementation for event security, we conducted 23 semi-structured interviews with event security practitioners across a variety of organized event contexts and supplemented interviews with field observations of two event planning cycles and the deployment of the event security and safety plan for those events. Event security is a multidisciplinary, multifaceted operation. Orchestrating security for organized events requires appropriate deployment and use of limited resources to protect attendees and workers against – and limit the harm of – a wide range of known and potential violence risks. Creating a defensible security apparatus can be a challenge, as solutions to predictable and unexpected problems may differ. To that end, our research findings indicate that event security coordinators must carefully balance competing objectives throughout security vision-setting, planning, and implementation. More specifically, our analysis of interview data and field observations identified 13 tensions or decision considerations that event security coordinators (and risk managers broadly) must manage.

Orchestrating security for organized events requires appropriate deployment and use of limited resources to protect attendees and workers against – and limit the harm of – a wide range of known and potential violence risks.

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