Notice an Increase in Concert Security Yet? It’s Coming.
Forget the Bataclan and Manchester. Security at concerts has been steadily ramping up since 9/11 and we’re not going back. Venues, promoters, performers, police forces and governments know that soft targets like concerts are vulnerable to some maniac committing an atrocity. What’s being done to make sure people can go to shows and not worry about dying?
Sure, we have metal detectors, pat downs and bag searches. But some places are already using vapor-sniffing dogs, anti-drone measures, social media monitoring and face-mapping. Rolling Stone has this on new concert security measures.
In the hours after a bomb killed 22 people outside an Ariana Grande concert at England’s Manchester Arena, representatives for 26 of the world’s biggest venues held a conference call with security officials about how to prevent another attack. “To this point, security has been about crowd management, but now there has to be terrorism [prevention] built into the concert,” says Bill Bratton, the former New York police commissioner who is the executive chairman of Prevent Advisors, which consults dozens of arenas, including Madison Square Garden and the L.A. Forum.
On a recent afternoon in L.A., 300 concert-industry veterans attended a conference where Bratton and his team showed off and discussed the newest technologies – from invisible walls that keep foreign objects out to facial-recognition software – that concert venues are using to battle terrorism. Here are some of the latest inventions that aim to be the future of crowd safety.
