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Criminal gangs may target smaller festivals in 2011
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 19 November 2010
Smaller music festivals may become targets for criminal gangs, that was a warning given at the Festival Conference in London yesterday.
A session on festival security noted the successes achieved in recent years by bigger festivals in cutting on-site crime, including the achievements made by those Association Of Independent Festival members who have collaborated on crime issues via their Security Task Force. On that initiative, AIF member Jim Loud of the RockNess festival told the conference: “The conscious effort to get police and promoters in one room and look at tackling this has been incredibly successful”.
But, according to the BBC, security expert Reg Walker of The Iridium Consultancy said he feared that, as a result of the successes of initiatives like the Security Task Force, criminals would be “pushed to the smaller festivals, with less security”, adding: “Small festivals do not have specially trained officers they can call on and have very low, or sometimes no level of policing at all”.
Detective Constable Kevin Walker of Leicestershire Police, who oversees the policing of the Download festival, agreed, admitting he’d already seen this trend begin. Meanwhile Sofia Hagberg from the 7000 capacity End Of The Road festival revealed that, after being crime free for years, this year her event was targeted by a criminal gang and thefts were reported from 100 tents.
Hagberg added that, for small festivals, it is particularly hard because budgets are tight and big security operations are expensive. Though they had offered a free lock-up facility for festival-goers this year which had been popular and successful.
Loud urged those who run smaller boutique festivals to review their security set ups in 2011 so to give festival-goers at large peace of mind. To that end Walker said that, while there were always stories about crime rates after major music events, “statistically, you are still much safer at a music festival than you are walking down the high street”.
