England’s hopes for securing the 2006 World Cup could rest on how well England manages to control football hooliganism during Euro 2000. The 24 administrators of FIFA, the world governing body, are due to cast their votes to determine which country will host the event, six years hence, this summer, just weeks after the end of Euro 2000. One of the deciding factors is bound to be any negative perceptions garnered as a result of rioting and other pernicious crimes.
But in fairness, the UK has taken enormous leaps and bounds when it comes to security and safety in football stadia following the tragic stadia disasters of the past.
One stadium which has set an example for others to follow is Blackburn Rovers’ Ewood Park. Under the direction of stadium manager Mel Highmore, it has installed a comprehensive system of surveillance, crowd monitoring, access control and management of stewards.
Ewood Park
Highmore was a founding member of the Football Safety Officers Association in 1992, and up until 1995 was the treasurer. Work pressures mean that he is not able to take as active a role in the Association as he used to, but he considers it an invaluable resource for anyone concerned about safety and security in stadia. Today, the FSOA comprises over 200 members and advises the major football bodies on safety and security issues.
At Ewood Park, the management take security very seriously indeed. Back in 1990, the Taylor report has just been released and Mel Highmore, then a chief inspector and crime prevention officer, received a call from the Blackburn Rovers club secretary asking if he’d be interested in a job.
He went for the interview and took the job on a part-time basis, but within one year the job was expanded to full-time. Then with the beginning of construction of new stands in 1993, the job was expanded to encompass security and facilities management. John Newsham, safety officer, was appointed in that year to assist Highmore with his growing responsibilities.
Highmore has very much been an innovator when it comes to safety. Using the motto that without security you haven’t got safety, he has installed extensive and comprehensive access control systems - a Progeny system supplied by BSB Electronics - which can accurately monitor and record the state of security in the entire stadium.
Although on a day-to-day basis security comprises just 20% of Highmore’s job, on match days it continues to be his over-riding priority.
Highmore and Newsham liaise closely with the police on match days. They, with the match commander, sit in the central control room which has a commanding view of the pitch. From there, the match day safety team have total control over the CCTV, access control, exit gate, turnstile and automatic crowd counting systems.
The CCTV system comprises colour units inside the ground and mono cameras outside, linked to a Molynx system. It was installed by Romers CCTV.
The nature of the game is changing...more and more women are taking an interest... For better or worse, the days of general male rowdiness in the terraces is fading away
During non-match days, the system is a general security system for the club, but on match days the master controller for the system, in the central control room, takes over.
Potential hotspots are routinely pre-programmed into the system prior to matches, using a combination of club and police intelligence, which enables the CCTV operator to make use of the systems automatic patrol features.
Innovator
Forecasting and ticket sale information, combined with turnstile data, enables Highmore and his safety staff to ensure that the stands do not become overcrowded and to make judgements about how soon the stands will actually fill up.
In certain instances, they have even been able to tell when a significant number of fans have not yet turned up, perhaps due to traffic problems on the motorways or an accident locally, enabling the referee to delay the start of a game to allow everyone to show up.
The system was developed by John Strickland of Tate Systems, and is used at a majority of football stadia. It enables the stadia management to see exactly how many people are in each stand and how close to total safe occupancy it has reached. There is even an alarm facility so that when it reaches a certain threshold, the safety staff will be alerted and can take action to prevent safe occupancy being exceeded.
Once inside the club, the fans are well protected by the hundreds of stewards who are deployed on match days. Out of 450 stewards on the books at Ewood Park, 30% are women. Highmore feels that women have a natural ability to soothe difficult fans. There are also a significant number of Asian stewards on the books, because as he points out, Blackburn is a multi-ethnic town.
The stewards themselves are trained to high standards, and must undergo routine re-examination. As evidence of how well they are trained, Highmore points out that Ewood Park was one of the first to gain the new Football Stewards Qualification, awarded by the Football League.
When the qualification was launched six months ago, safety officer Newsham was able to move rapidly to ensure his stewards gained the qualification because he had been aware of preparations for the award for some time: “We already had the elements in place because we have been gathering information for the past two years.”
Using CCTV intelligence, the match controllers can deploy stewards to quell trouble almost before it starts using the Kenwood multi-channel radio system. The radios are sophisticated devices, some of which double as telephones. All calls and radio communications are logged on a computer so that if there is a question following an incident, it is possible to go back and audit the messages.
Stewards are trained in a number of techniques for dealing with troublemakers, but one of the club’s favourite tactics is to wait for unruly fans to leave their seats for the concourse to go to the toilets. As they leave, the match day controller radios the stewards in the area who can then detain the person away from the crowd. This way, confrontations in the stands, where tempers could fray and other fans become involved, are avoided. Plus, it maintains a genteel atmosphere for the club.
Source
SMT
