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
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