Involved in event management for a venue? You understand the threat of targeted violence firsthand. What emergency management best practices should you deploy to prepare for potential incidents?
In the following article, we delve into CISA’s recent venue security considerations guide.
Why CISA?
Well, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) serves as the sector risk management agency for commercial facilities. In that capacity, the agency partners with venue operators to prepare for potential incidents.
One of CISA’s most recent initiatives has been the development of the Venue Guide for Security Considerations.
Developed in tandem with industry experts and security professionals, the Guide serves as a broad catalog of actions to support safe, secure, day-to-day operations and event and emergency management planning and execution.
More specifically, the Guide aims to help venue operators enhance safety, protect assets, and create secure environments through effective security and emergency measures and best practices.
What else does the Guide do?
Such as evaluating security measures, complexity levels, costs, options, and threats mitigated by these measures. By balancing these factors, venues can create a secure environment for operators and guests.
Such as assessing measures and improving physical security compliance to ensure staff and visitor safety.
For prioritizing the most effective security practices and proactively reducing the risk of major threats.
Allowing them to select the most suitable and effective measures for their venue’s budget, size, location, and risk factors.
Without reading the Guide, venue operators already know to conduct a thorough risk assessment to properly identify and mitigate potential threats. However, the Guide does a great job of laying out the potential threats venue operators are most likely to face. Those threats include:
From there, best-practice measures, as the Guide points out, are likely to run the gamut from low to high complexity.
At the one end, low-complexity measures are those that are easy to implement using readily available resources. They might include:
At the other end of the spectrum, high-complexity security measures require resources that are
not readily available. Relevant measures include:
Now, what are some emergency-management measures venue operators should deploy? The Guide recommends the following:
Of course, those measures only scratch the surface of what venue operators should do to mitigate threats to their events. For more all-hazards planning strategies, download our All-Hazards Planning Guide to Effective Major Event Management.