alcohol sales. And at most events you’re going to have people who have a few too many beers and you need to escort them out. Maybe you need to keep a mosh pit in-check or escort an act to their tour bus. Those were basically the things that made security a necessity at an event say 20 years ago. You just needed to be a presence. We’re now more of an information piece than we’ve ever been. People at an event now expect security to know the event site in and out. That’s because as an industry, we’ve mostly moved beyond the arms folded, cold stare image of the past. We’re approachable and knowledgeable. People expect you to be coordinated with the police, to have emergency plans in place, they expect you to get that they’ve just spent maybe a hundred dollars or more on a ticket and that they just want to enjoy the show free of worry – and we do everything we can to make that happen.” Toursec delivers that peace of mind to event promoters and they have never lost a client to a competitor because, he explained, he has every reason to want to do things right. “For starters, I don’t want to be sued,” he laughed. “But unethical practices and shoddy training do seriously sink a lot of companies in this industry. You can’t hire people who have a reputation for using force when it’s not called for. Like I said, that kind of thing becomes the event. You need to know where you stand and what you’re permitted to do. I also own a mainstream security company that has over 10,000 arrests under its belt, so that’s really informed how I’ve trained my Toursec teams.” Dan trains Toursec recruits in the principals of the Incident Command System, a collective of police, fire, EMS, and other response and regulatory agencies. “ICS is an incident management system. We use this system at our events, and I train for it with the best.
“It doesn’t matter if an event is run perfectly, there’s always a small magnitude of chaos in any large crowd situation. The key is to never stand back and let things unfold. We stay engaged.” Toursec became the first private security company (several years ago) to carry Narcan. They have four provincially certified trainers on staff and during events, and usually have over 50 kits in the field for events. AlthoughToursec teams arefirst aidqualified, they take direction from their own dispatcher who is a paramedic. Cases are then handed off to the site paramedic teams.
belief among some of the event planners out there that they only need to do the bare minimum. It’s because there is a temp agency mentality around most big events. Event planners hire as many event security companies as they need to fill what are essentially moats throughout the event space. It’s more or less a bunch of security guards looking for beer being passed across barriers and needless to say there’s minimal skill there. Don’t get me wrong, if the event runs smoothly and they’ve prevented outside beer from being passed through a fence, or what have you, that’s great – especially if the client is happy. But given today’s temperament, do those guards know how to respond to the potential dangers of crowds? So many live events go with the lowest bidder for security – which is a mentality that actually kept us from joining the industry sooner than we did – and that means in some cases a company rents its shirts to the kids they hire who have no training and no means of communication. That’s just not acceptable.” It’s a hard-learned lesson that event security considerations can no longer be merely a cost centre, Dan explained. “When something bad happens at an event now, it becomes the event. In the old days you had to have security because you need to screen people at the gate – you don’t want them bringing alcohol in and impacting your
“When something bad happens at an event now, it becomes the event.”
54 SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • AUGUST 2019
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