David Michael Miller
As a frequent concert-goer, Chooey Cornelius says safety is all about self-awareness.
“As long as you have the right people with you, you know who you’re with, it’s fine,” says Cornelius, who was waiting in line at the Orpheum in November to see Flosstradamus.
With terrorist attacks and mass shootings on the rise in recent years, entertainment venues around the world face a potentially greater need for security measures.
But Cornelius, a 20-year-old Appleton resident who often attends concerts in Madison and Milwaukee, says she’s never felt unsafe attending a concert in the area.
“When everyone is inside, you can see who you’re surrounding yourself with,” she says. “And you have to go in with the right mindset. If you’re going to a rock concert, there’s going to be a lot of people with different attitudes and different energies than if you’re going to an EDM concert.”
Regardless, recent attacks targeting people out for a game or the night — including the 2015 terrorist attacks at a Paris soccer stadium and theater, the mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub last summer, and the New Year’s Eve mass shooting in an Istanbul club — have raised the stakes for venue owners.
Tag Evers, a Madison-based promoter and founder of True Endeavors, says more security may be in his industry’s future, but cautions that a balance needs to be struck between safety and overreaction.
“What has to happen is that people need to feel safe when they go out, but it also needs to be balanced,” he says. “We can’t enter into a type of hysteria where we lose our sense of freedom. On the other hand, if these things start to happen on a more regular basis, then it’ll have to change…. The chances of dying of a terrorism attack are extremely remote, but it clearly has everyone on notice. The industry is adjusting.”
Some local venues have made major security adjustments in the past year. UW-Madison officials announced in early October that the Kohl Center, home to the university’s basketball and hockey teams, would install metal detectors at every entryway. The Overture Center started doing bag checks after a few employees attended a May 2015 industry conference in New York City, where a session was dedicated to discussing security trends in the industry — namely, checking bags for firearms and other potential threats.
Others, though, haven’t made as many changes — mostly because the threat doesn’t seem particularly immediate.
“When the media covers stories about those incidents for an extended period of time, there might be fear in people going to large spaces with large groups of people, but we want to encourage people to go about their lives as they always have,” says Matt Gerding, co-owner of the Majestic. “It’s still safe.”
Gerding says that it would be natural for patrons to think twice about attending a concert immediately after an incident occurs somewhere in the world. But the initial fears inevitably fade, and people realize that Madison, and the live music venue community in general, is under no urgent threat.
“The initial response is to hibernate out of fear, but people tend to realize that it was an isolated incident,” he says.
Resistance to increasing security might also stem from the fact that it doesn’t come cheap, says Evers. Larger venues have the resources to pay for comprehensive measures. Smaller ones don’t.
“Larger venues are responding more quickly or with more immediacy, partly because they have bigger operations and are doing more shows, and, perhaps, there is more liability at stake,” Evers says. “But metal detectors cost around $5,000 each. You couldn’t find a club in town that could take on a cost like that very easily. To have more uniformed security present at every single show and checking [patrons] and patting them down, that starts to add up to several hundred dollars a night. I would say that it’s most likely true that nobody who owns a club in town is excited about taking on that additional cost. But the world is changing.”