This past Saturday afternoon, I was walking with my nine-year-old son in Midtown Atlanta when we came upon one of the city’s greatest landmarks, the Fox Theater.
As you walk down the sidewalk, you can’t miss the place. The building itself is huge, ornate and beautiful, and its iconic Fox sign towering above has been around since the theater opened its doors with a showing of Steamboat Willie on Christmas Day, 1929.
Today, the “Fabulous Fox” – as the locals call it – plays host to Broadway musicals, concerts, comedy shows, and even weekend weddings in its extravagant ballrooms or lounges. My son and I weren’t there for a show – we were just doing some sightseeing – but there was a show scheduled, the Broadway musical “Finding Neverland” about Peter Pan; thus, lots of well-dressed parents and kids were streaming into the theater.
We waded among the throng of people just to get a glimpse of the historic building, and as we finally reached the entrance, there were lines of hundreds of people – all waiting to get through a bank of metal detectors. My son looked up at me and asked, “What are those for?”
I told him exactly what they were, and why they were there. Of course, they were keeping us from seeing the Fox in its full glory, but as I explained, they were necessary to keep us safe. I left out the ironic diatribe on “security theater happening at a theater” that was going through my head.
Two days earlier, a man with a history of mental health issues allegedly got high on PCP and plowed his car into a group of pedestrians in the middle of Times Square, killing an 18-year-old and injuring more than 20 others. Two days after our Midtown walk, a suicide bomber detonated an improvised explosive device outside of an Ariana Grande concert in the U.K., killing more than 20 people.
The latter incident got me thinking regretfully about the snarky remark I made in my head just a couple days earlier.
In this day and age – even for those of us who are close to the security industry – it is so easy to get complacent. We walk into the airport and moan and complain about the inefficiency of the screening process. We grudgingly take off our shoes and empty our bag of all laptops as we look around and say to ourselves “nothing is ever going to happen here.”
We see a bank of metal detectors screening grandmothers and children before they go into a musical theater performance for kids and automatically see it as an unnecessary inconvenience. But here’s the thing to latch onto – it is actually working.
All of the metal detectors, increased security presence and other technologies and efforts embarked upon by our industry have driven a large portion of these attacks from within a venue to the outer perimeter of it. And while bad acts are still reprehensible, thanks to these efforts, the damage is – hopefully – limited. Using the Times Square incident as an example, had there not been a huge bank of bollards there to stop the vehicle, it could have been much worse.
Our jobs, of course, are never done. The industry must now turn its attention to the outer perimeters of these sorts of events and facilities, while staying vigilant about keeping bad actors out of the buildings themselves. In the end, we must fight the complacency inherent in many of us, and make certain that campaigns like “see something, say something” remain a mantra – never a punchline.
Paul Rothman is Editor in Chief of Security Dealer & Integrator (SD&I) magazine. Access SD&I's current issue, full archives, subscription links and more at www.secdealer.com.
