Prevent Advisors’ Mike Downing On Inaugural Secure Venues Summit, Protecting Live Experiences

Singing along with our favorite artists and dancing with our loved ones, live events can provide some of the most magical moments of our lives. On the other hand, live events have also been the setting for unthinkable catastrophes, from terrorist attacks to crowd crushes. To help prevent such tragedies and advance a culture of prevention, the first-ever Secure Venues Summit will bring together security professionals, venue operators, public safety officials and industry partners from across the nation for two days of immersive programming, thought leadership, and hands-on collaboration.

The event, which takes place May 6-7 at the Sheraton Grand Seattle is being launched byPollstar parent company Oak View Group (OVG), the global leader in venue development and solutions, hospitality, and direct investment for the sports and live entertainment industries, and Prevent Advisors, a leader in safety, security, and risk management solutions for sports, entertainment, and live event venues.

The Secure Venue Summit will examine the evolving threat landscape and provide practical strategies to help organizations better deter, prepare for, and respond to potential risks. Programming at the event includes keynote addresses, panel discussions, breakout sessions, fireside chats, and a live tabletop exercise, as well as networking events. Topics covered during the two days will include emerging technologies, crowd management, fan behavior, domestic violent extremism, drone mitigation, and best practices for operations, incident management, and interagency coordination.

The Summit is open to professionals across all sectors of live entertainment, sports, cultural institutions, and venue management, from front-line staff to senior executives. Attendees will receive admission to the Welcome Networking Event on May 5; access to the Exhibit Hall, featuring leading products and service providers; and discounted accommodations at the Sheraton Grand Seattle (limited availability). Registration is now open at www.securevenuessummit.com. Pollstar caught up with Mike Downing, who serves as Chief Security Officer at Oak View Group and the President of Prevent Advisors, to learn more.

Pollstar: Why was now the right time to host the first ever secure venue summit?
Michael Downing: [Prevent Advisors] has been in this space now for nearly nine years. We’ve emerged as I would say very, very strong expert practitioners. We [work with] sport leagues, in corporate America, Walt Disney, NBC, Universal, critical infrastructure throughout America. And we’ve developed a trade craft and smart practices that we think are worth sharing with our partners, especially the OVG enterprise where we’re trying to build consistent policies [and] procedures, good training programs, and how to build relationships with stakeholders. Really, our key message is we want to develop a prevention culture. And when there’s a crisis, [while] we do rely on first responders, we want everybody in the private sector space to think of themselves as first preventers.

How did you approach putting together the summit as far as topics that will be covered?
All of our team members played a huge role in the development of the agenda. We taxed our rolodex and our network throughout the country throughout North America actually. And we have the smartest minds, the best practitioners, people who have learned critical lessons in this space. We put together an agenda that not only talks about “The Why” – why we are doing this – [but “The How To.”].

I have a special guest from Canada and the United Kingdom that we are inviting to talk about that. Her son was killed in the Ariana Grande bombing. Her name is Figen Murray. Over the past 10 years [she’s] actually developed a law – [Martyn’s Law, otherwise known as the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025] that the United Kingdom implemented. Before the bombing, [venues] were so concerned about how many toilets a venue would have, but they weren’t necessarily concerned about security and the ratio of security. And so my work has implemented that so that when I walk into an arena or any patron walks into an arena, there’ll be a sense of security.

The summit will feature two days of immersive programming, including an interactive live tabletop exercise. Anything you could tell readers about that?
I’ve been at conferences for the last 30 years and you have powerpoints, you have lectures, you have lightning talks, you have panels but this is a real time almost a field exercise that is being brought into an indoor space where there’s going to be several scenarios that are going to unfold. There will be a unified command that will be put together. There will be role players from state local agencies and our experts will facilitate it. There will also be audience participation. So people will actually see and witness pandemonium and chaos – how that is organized and brought together so that they can deal with bringing conditions to normal as quickly as possible through unified command. And it’ll be I think it’s going to be an aha experience for the people in the audience.

Anything else you wanted to mention as far as panels or keynotes you’re most excited about?
Our keynote is Voviette D. Morgan, who was a high level FBI agent who is now head of security for the LA 2028 Olympics and [she’ll be sharing about] everything that she has to do to prepare for the Olympics, everything from threats to technology to the strategies and tactics that the adversary is using, how to defeat those, how to organize. It’s going to be a dynamic lecture. We’re also talking about design and how to build prevention into the design of venues. We’re talking about crisis response and how to deal with that with real world examples on crisis response. And essentially, we’re talking about not only protecting the venue and the artists and the management and the patrons, but we’re also protecting the experience that people have … how to experience that joy. We’re talking about how to reduce risk. We’re talking about what is the greatest nightmare of the security director, what causes them to not be able to sleep at night. You know, the type of training that we do and what kind of risks we’re anticipating in the future.  We also have breakout sessions. We have some really dynamic what we call 7-7 Lightning Sessions which is a seven-minute talk that provides inspiration and understanding about specific people and their experience in the industry. I think that’s going to be dynamic.

We have the national expert on unmanned aerial systems or drones – Bill Edwards – and he’s going to address the new laws that have been passed that allow mitigation and interdiction of these drones and what that threat looks like in the next several years. So that’s going to be a very interesting topic as well.
 
And when you’re talking security, it’s not just terrorist attacks, but incidents like the fatal crowd crush that happened during Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival in Houston?
That is absolute security. We talk about crowd management, crowd control, what the difference is, how the design of venues and the design at festivals impact that. And that’s a big part of it because that falls into the prevention category where things like that could have been prevented had they been worked smarter. It’s how you manage crowds. And if it does become pandemonium, how you go into crowd control, how you use technology to help you, what the training is for all that. Yeah, it’s  all-encompassing.

Was there anything significant about Seattle hosting the inaugural event? 
It was really our first arena that [Prevent Advisors] were involved in from the design to the development of policies and procedures to the training and it was really where we got our start working with Oak View Group.

Anything else you wanted to add? 
We’ve looked at past events, everything from Route 91 to the Manchester Arena bombing and several others to look at the hard lessons and what we can decipher from that and how we can mitigate our strategy so that we can work with an eye toward prevention and protecting people attending events because I think especially today people want to go to these events to have fellowship and camaraderie and experience joy and we want to contribute as much as possible to that.