Event Safety Insights Issue Four | Summer 2017 | Page 51

Load-Out Event Security and Black Swans By Steven Adelman Following the May 22, 2017 bombing outside Manchester Arena, many smart people of- fered suggestions how to make entertainment ven- ues safer, how to make security more robust in both public and private spaces, and how to make us less vulnerable to bad guys. The ideas have ranged from the usual (more guards doing bag checks and more magnetometers) to the trendy (extending the security perimeter further away from entrance doors), ideas that look back- wards to avoid another Manchester (sending peo- ple out more exits after a show to offer a less con- centrated target) and ideas that look into the future (walk-through devices that can detect explosives and firearms and also use facial recognition tied to the venue’s CCTV). In conversations I’ve had over the last six weeks with my local police and NYPD, with FBI agents and even the U.S. Secret Service, it has become ap- parent that some of these well-meaning ideas are more practical for event spaces than others. Securi- ty does not have to be a zero-sum game, but for the price of a modest drink I can point out how some of the widely-discussed solutions would strength- en one area while exposing another to new risks. I bet you can too. More importantly, each event and venue profes- sional is going to know more about their shows and how their space works than any outside expert or consultant. You know best what is reasonable un- der your circumstances. So rather than getting into a debate here about whether clear bags or no bags are the best policy, or how to enforce a law that al- lows you to ban guns at your shows, I have some- thing else to offer that is more within my own law- yerly wheelhouse. PERSPECTIVE I don’t remember when I bought a copy of The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I know I started it some years ago because I dog-eared a few pages, but it apparently didn’t resonate with me then. When I picked it up again recently, I found a connection to my post-Manchester discussions. Now I see Black Swans everywhere. The metaphor of the black swan is simple. Before Australia was discovered, people in the Old World thought all swans were white. This is because they had only ever seen white swans, and seeing, then as now, tends to equal believing. So imagine the sur- prise when black swans were sighted, rendering the prior certainty -- based on all the prior empirical ev- idence -- completely wrong. The phenomenon of the Black Swan works the same way. It refers to any event which (1) is very rare, (2) has an extreme impact, and (3) seems retrospectively predictable. Let’s break these elements down so we understand them, and then we can see how the Black Swan idea applies to venue and event security in the current historical context. First, a Black Swan is an outlier. It is anything that lies far outside regular expectations because nothing in the past suggests that this new occurrence was even a possibility. For a turkey, Thanksgiving morning is a Black Swan. (Think about it a minute.) I have previ- ously written about how confirmation bias, the belief that today will not be a radical deviation from every day that came before, slows down our perception and reaction time in active shooter situations. Second, a Black Swan has an extreme impact. Again, consider the Thanksgiving turkey, or the ship cap- tain who claimed to have never even seen a wreck 51