How can we improve security at event venues?

Improving Security at Event Venues

Download the Year 7 project summary.

Project Summary 

Large-scale public events such as the 2028 Olympics are attractive targets for terrorism and mass-casualty violence, yet event security practitioners often have limited case-based knowledge of these threats and no clear way to judge whether security solutions tested at smaller events will transfer to a mega-event. This project addresses that gap by examining terrorism and other threats to large-scale event venues, including international incidents, and by studying how event risk managers evaluate and translate lessons from security exercises and test events into real-world practice.

Purpose/Objectives 

This project gives DHS and its event security partners, including CISA’s Protective Security Advisors and Office for Bombing Prevention, the U.S. Secret Service, and CBP, an empirically grounded understanding of terrorism threats to large-scale public events and of how lessons from security exercises and test events actually transfer into operational readiness ahead of the 2028 Olympics.

Method 

The project has four tasks:

• Task 1 conducts a rapid evidence review of literature on large-scale public events.
• Task 2 builds an open-source dataset from public records, media reporting, and court documents on terrorism and other threats to large-scale events, supplemented by a survey of event security personnel.
• Task 3 conducts field work, focus groups, and interviews with event security and risk management professionals to understand how exercise and test-event lessons transfer to practice.
• Task 4 fields a public survey and survey experiment during the 2026 World Cup.

Outputs and Impact 

• A synthesis of current knowledge on terrorism and other human security threats to large-scale public sporting events.
• Open-source list of terrorism and other threats to large-scale public events, along with insight into which security operations succeeded or failed during past incidents.
• Identification of the external, interpersonal, and personal conditions that shape event risk managers’ perceptions of exercise and test-event success.
• Findings from a public survey fielded during the 2026 FIFA World Cup on public perceptions of event security, risk, and security-related communications.

Research Team

• University of Nebraska at Omaha
• Research Associate and Technology Transition Lead at NCITE
• College of Business Administration
• Expertise: Technology transition, industrial-organizational psychology

• University of Nebraska at Omaha
• Associate Professor, Head of Prevention Research Initiatives at NCITE
• School of Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Expertise: Relationship between public perceptions of terrorism and counterterrorism practices, relationship between communities and law enforcement