The Importance of Event Security in the realm of Security Services
By David Elm
In the current day, any mass event, be it from a small scale high-profile family wedding to the NFL games, requires copious amounts of security due to the rise of threats. Of course, these may not be events that surround only celebrities or celebrity sports teams, these could be just about any event with a sizable number of civilians involved. What more, recent criminal attacks have demanded attention towards emergency response and security planning? With constant terrorism threats, crowd safety, especially ones that include large audiences, safety is a high concern.
Event Security Demands
With events that require a considerable number of participants, ranging from sporting events to concerts to even conferences, always is the target for criminal activity. This includes any range of crime from petty theft to hostage situations and the like. Under circumstances like these, where there is an attraction of crowd, there is always demand for security.
In fact, you’d see so much demand that the costs of Event Security personnel are expected to rise according to around 48 percent of events professionals according to MPI Meetings Outlook.
What Event Security Brings to the Security Services Table?
Event Security is rather different from personal security services and celebrity security services. What makes it contrast from the field would be as follows:
- Event security involves the risk assessment and comprehensive planning for large-scale to massive events. This includes attention that will be given to previous threats, general hoaxes, political situations in the current area and cooperation with local police, public authorities and emergency services.
- As an Event Security personnel, you would need to think about, analyze and prepare for any and all repercussions.
- It involves training for catastrophes that may strike in any form to a large number of people. A shocking 93% of event professionals have confessed that they do not feel trained enough to deal with terror events according to Event Huddle 2016. Event Security works to alleviate this problem.
- Event Security also incorporates cybersecurity. As cybersecurity is not as developed for mass public events, it is quite generally seen as a low-hanging fruit for cybercriminals. It is relatively simple to hack into and steal guest IDs and records of events.
- There is much research conducted on the destination and event location and communications about risk is one way event security authorities handle the risk of attacks and terrorism. The majority (about 19% of professionals, according to Meeting Professionals International 2016) focusses on the provision of more employee training.
An Insight to Event Security Personnel
If you were training to become an event security personnel, you would require a bit of insight into what they specialize in that might be different from the general security sector. This will include:
- Checking ID and controlling accessibility by only allowing authenticated credentials.
- Finding and identifying items that are prohibited through actions such as pat downs, bag searches and etc.,
- Locating, identifying and recognizing areas of importance, key features and security blind-spots of event spaces.
- Identifying and learning terms and features used by professionals, event staff, and security.
- Specializing in emergency responses.
The Downsides:
Event security might come at a price as well. You need to know the right number of security personnel employed, the right amount of security gadgets used and automated. There really is a thing like ‘too much security’ and for a fact; it is pondered over to be counter-productive in some cases. What might keep criminals safe in large public events is their sheer size alone and yet with countless security equipment, screening, and checks, in some cases, criminal activity does occur. The key is to not have more security; it is to have effective security in the right proportion.
Former Head of Security for the Olympic Delivery Authority of the 2012 London Games, Steve Cooper states that event and masses security must be “properly integrated, but proportionality is key otherwise you will burn budgets and not be a lot more effective.” This is a fairly perfect and evident statement on how important event security is and the importance of the perfect amount of it as well.
Conclusion:
Event Security is an essential feature of security services. The field offers a wide variety of employment opportunities as well. It also covers some major security concerns of the present day, namely attacks and cyber-crime. There is not much argument about the need for security for large events and high-profile ones especially, in recent times, the demand has been fairly great, requiring trained and experienced authorities, personnel and professionals.