While Levi’s Stadium becomes a small city on game day, the University Kentucky, with its nearly 33,000 students, is a small city itself, complete with a major hospital and about 6,000 residents who live in on-campus housing. On football Saturdays, though, the university becomes Kentucky’s third-largest city, according to Monroe.
“We’re balancing our normal operations, which include a residence hall and a hospital with a trauma center, which is only about 1,000 feet from the stadium, with game-day operations,” Monroe said. “So, it’s about how to balance normal operations with special event operations. How do the two integrate? We have almost 9,000 access control points on campus and well over 4,000 cameras, which give us good situational awareness. It’s really important to think about, as you’re using the technology, to identify what it is you really need to get that balance.”
DIVE DEEPER: How IT and operational tech put energy and utility companies at risk.
How Physical Security Teams Thwart Insider Threats
Because of the large number of employees and volunteers who work big events, security leaders must be constantly vigilant about the insider threat: the potential for someone to infiltrate the staff with the intent of doing harm.
It was a lesson Bertsch was reminded of in 2018 during an event the IRONMAN Group organized in Chattanooga, Tenn., when a sharp-eyed member of local law enforcement spotted a man staffing a security post whom the officer recognized as someone who was on a terrorist watch list.
“We ended up spinning up our incident action plans to ask how this happened,” Bertsch recalled. “He just walked up to one of our volunteer tables and said, ‘I’d like to help.’” He was handed a security shirt and shown to a post. “We were really, really lucky.”
No one was harmed, and the individual was removed. But the incident forced the organization to rethink its process for vetting volunteers. Today, volunteers sign up online in advance. “We were able to put an API in place to automatically perform a background screen,” Bertsch said. “It’s not a background check, it’s a background screen, but it allows us to preemptively put up a barrier.”
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