This week Security Management chatted with Jim Francis, CPP, CFSO, the vice president of consulting services for T&M Protection Resources, LLC. Jim received his first run-in with security techniques during his stint with Air Force Intelligence. After leaving the military, Jim has worked for defense and security powerhouses such as Lockheed Missiles and Space Company and Kroll. During his seminar session, Jim will discuss his experience implementing a security program at the new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.

What are you speaking about at Seminar, Jim?

Lou Marciani, director of the National Center for Spectator Safety and Security (NCS4), is going to give an introduction into his Sport Event Secure Aware (SESA) program, which is the program they’re doing to establish some accreditation standards for security programs within sports venues. He’s going to walk folks through that, explain how the program came together, discuss what outcomes people can expect from participation in the program, and talk about the program’s goals and its methodologies. Then Todd Letcher, Executive Director of Stadium Security and Emergency Services for the New York Yankees, and I are going to talk about how the security program and plans came together for the new Yankee Stadium and how that compares to the academic model presented by Marciani.

When you sit down and think about Yankee Stadium in New York City, a prime terrorism target, what is your primary concern?

We get asked a lot how we commence a project. And commencing a project really begins with an assessment of current conditions and the specific threats associated with that entity, whatever it is. Only once you have that, can you move forward with developing appropriate countermeasures.

What ranked as your highest concern during your risk and threat assessments?

I can’t tell you specifically but I can generally tell you that terrorist threats certainly were the highest concern.

What do you worry about the most when it comes to high probability, low impact threats? And how did you design the security program to help security officials?

Relative to the risks and issues facing virtually any sports facility, but in particular Yankee Stadium, there are general criminal activities that you have to be concerned about. You have large gatherings of people in what become very crowded areas. So you have to be concerned about pickpockets and other kinds of folks that prey on that confined crowd. As a venue, you have to be concerned about scalpers. A major concern is traffic control and people movement as you’re approaching and exiting the facility. All of those have to be taken into consideration for, let’s call it, the exterior grounds. Interior, you have to be concerned about player, field, and umpire protection, because fans have been known to do some crazy things. And so protecting the dugout and protecting the locker room area is a critical function. Major League Baseball does provide some general guidelines as it pertains to protecting those key spaces of a stadium.

Then you have to have people who can react within the stadium. For Yankee Stadium we developed all of the security and emergency management operating protocols, up to and including the evacuation plans, the fire safety plan, the detailed plans for how things like deliveries and people would move in and through the facility. So we had to bounce that against the kinds of threats that were perceived or, in fact, had occurred, so that we could make sure we covered all of the contingencies.

Interior: there are the common things that you have when you have folks that might abuse alcohol a little bit more than they should. So fan behavior is certainly an issue. There is the general safety of the public in making sure you have medical response in case somebody slips and falls or has a heart attack in the stadium. All of those things come to play. And, as you can well imagine, there’s a considerable concern about retail. You have money changing hands and you have accumulation of that money and then the ultimate cashing out and the movement of that money. All of those things should be considered in the overall planning.

With the memory of Oklahoma City and frequent occurrences of IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan, how is the separation between the stadium and the city streets?

Yankee Stadium, old and new, both sit on city streets and so the new Yankee Stadium is surrounded by 161th Street, Jerome and River avenues, and there’s a garage on 164th Street, so you have street traffic that is essentially right up to the curb, all around these three sides of the facility. The garage is at the rear, so we have some control over who can park there. But we do have major concerns about control of street traffic.

How do you minimize that?

We coordinate with NYPD relative to traffic management. In fact, at certain points the streets are closed to certain categories of traffic.

When you draw up stadium security plans, what’s the most difficult part of it? Is it coordination?

There are a lot of stakeholders, as you can well imagine—especially when you’re trying to pull together the plans for any major facility, particularly one of an iconic nature in an area of recognized threat. There’s a lot of coordination and a lot of stakeholders, and so ensuring each voice is heard is important. Coming up with a prudent, practical program that is approved by all parties can sometimes be a challenge.

Moving in another direction, what is the biggest difference between academic notions of security, like the SESA program, and the way you as a security practitioner come at it?

I think the academic end of it has developed a pretty sound process. We’re merely going to be showing that while we may have not followed that process exactly as defined in the SESA program, the process that developed the ultimate plans and procedures for Yankee Stadium followed enough of a similar process so that the end result would have been same.

What limits your ability to follow academic methodologies like the SESA program in real world situations?

Part of the problem is that there isn’t one single process. If you’ve delved into the aspects of threat assessment and ultimate mitigation planning, there are at least a dozen methodologies that I can think of off the top of my head and they all vary slightly. So what we wind up doing from a practical perspective is picking and choosing the best parts of all of them to make something that works in a commercial environment.

A lot of the methodologies were developed within the body of the government, by the various agencies: DHS, Sandia Labs, etc. and they each have their own independent skew. I happen to like CARVER, which is a model developed by the Department of Defense to use for target analysis. It makes you plan from the aggressor’s perspective. So while the SESA certainly has a model and a method, it would be utilizing pieces and parts of it and incorporating that into other options we have on our palette. It’s a good palette of choices that we have out there and what you have to do is demonstrate to your client that you are utilizing some good solid guides, but you’re not constrained by them.

So there are limitless variations to achieving security?

Right. Some of the various assessment technologies don’t give any ranking at all to probability. So if there’s no ranking of threat probability that means all threats have equal probability, which in the real world doesn’t exist. You’d wind up spending more money than you should spend.

Where do you think money is misspent when it comes to stadium security?

I think it’s probably misspent in training by not providing sufficient training in the appropriate areas. The folks that are the primary security caregivers, who are assigned to various stadiums and arenas, are mostly there as bodies in a uniform. And so I think that we need to better train those personnel to really be able to identify and react to the varying threats or incidents that might occur.

For instance, I’ll give you an example. One of the things I think, and this generally holds true for security in a lot of areas, is that we really need to incorporate behavioral pattern recognition techniques into security at all levels. That way we can better evaluate folks who are coming into our buildings, our events, our sports venues to give them that once over before they’re in our midst to hopefully mitigate an issue before it occurs.

But if you do start training security guards at Yankee Stadium in behavioral threat assessment techniques, they can’t be your typical guard?

These are folks that have to have some longevity, some interest in a career and not just people who are there for the day.

Doesn’t management have to understand that you’re going to have to pay these security guards more?

Yes.

Do you see a tendency among owners and managers to avoid that type of security training?

I think it’s more a lack of awareness of the benefit that kind of enhanced capability brings. So I think a part of any project that consultants are involved in is making your clients better understand how recommendations will mitigate the issues that they’re going to confront.

In your opinion, if you’re going to do security properly, is it better to invest more in humans or technology?

Frankly, it has to be a balance. Security is a balanced approach. You have to first begin with the construct of a facility. You have to begin with the architecture and the layout and the flow and the patterns of movement. It all begins there. Security consulting has to be involved in the earliest stages of a project so we can influence how all things move and flow into, around, and out of a facility. That’s where security really begins. Then everything is layered on that in order to give you that balanced program. So you will layer appropriate personnel, procedures, and operations on top of that now strong consideration for the facility and then you put the electronics in to supplement and assist the personnel. In some instances you might be able to economize on personnel by clever use of technology. It all has to be this balance.

Now balance doesn’t mean 50-50, so I couldn’t help but think that when it comes to stadium security, with its massive amounts of people, investing in more and better personnel is a wiser choice than technology.

No, there are benefits to both sides. Remember, beyond just having the people out there that can react and respond, you need to have the ability for situational awareness to make appropriate management decisions. A singular incident can blow into something bigger, so having the ability to technologically review what’s going on and be able to better remotely manage the incident is critical. It’s absolutely a balance between having those bodies there, which provide physical and obvious deterrent value, but also the reactionary response value. You still need all of that good ability to review and evaluate. Sometimes for a post-incident evaluation, having the technological capability, CCTV in this case, to look back and see “How did we do? What did we do? How can we do it better?”

Security isn’t driven only by that moment. It’s driven by “How did you plan for that moment? How did you react during that moment? How did you change after that moment to make it better?”

With Yankee Stadium open half the season now, what have you had to change to provide better security?

The only one I can talk about is that there is a huge difference between a building in blue prints and a building constructed. All of a sudden you find a beam there that you didn’t think was there. Now you have to route people in a different way or you have crowds accumulating in areas you didn’t expect. Those kinds of things we had to go back and rethink and relook at.

What are you most worried about when it comes to human traffic flows inside the stadium?

We’re most worried about evacuation.

Are you worried about routing people into one space where they are sitting ducks?

Absolutely. That’s why you need to have the technology to give your folks managing the crisis better awareness. They have to react and they have to redirect, so all of that is absolutely built in.

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For full coverage of the ASIS International 55th Annual Seminar and Exhibits, click here [1].