Danger from Above - Pollstar News

The threat to event goers in the next decade won’t just come from the ground. Former Army Green Beret and special forces officer Chris Robinette with Tim Leiweke’s new venture Prevent Advisors, part of the Oak View Group, told The Real that drone attacks present a real security challenge to event organizers.

“The Department of Homeland Security’s best practices for the leagues don’t have a fully thought-out answer” for dealing with an assault from an aggressor using a drone, said Robinette, who will serve as CEO of Prevent Advisors. Company officials recently announced that former NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton will join the venture as chairman and equity partner.

Former Army Green Beret Ben Tolle will serve as Prevent Advisors COO.

“The threat is growing, and it’s evolving quite quickly,” Robinette said. “It’s very adaptive. It’s not constrained in any way by resources. It’s not constrained in any way by rules or protocols. It can target a facility or a venue any time it wants in a million different forms.” Robinette said his group will take a holistic view to dealing with threats, combining resources and facilitating “discussion with local municipalities on how drone technology can be folded into their resources” and their early warning response mechanisms.

“We recognize that these buildings, sport facilities and live music halls are now part of the same risk profile that the government and military face,” he said. “If you look at the attacks in Paris or Orlando, venues are just as much a target but they don’t have the same manpower or intellectual capital and resources as the government provides to its own infrastructure. Ben and I are trying to leverage what’s in the community to build packages to address that threat.”

The goal of Prevent Advisors is to help facilities think through larger security threats and confront some of the fragmentation that exists in the venue industry. “It’s not that there’s no dialogue,” he said, “but the systems don’t necessarily overlap and the stakeholders don’t communicate with each. There is not a lot of intelligence fusion into driving decisions and protocols that you implement to provide security. Ben and I are trying to fuse together those parties. At the end of the day, to make this work, we’re going to have to have a much more collaborative approach between the public, private sector, the arena and leagues themselves.”