Safety and Security at Special Events: The Case of the Salt Lake City Olympic Games

Authors

Scott H. Decker
Jack R. Greene
Vinc Webb
Jeff Rojeck
Jack McDevitt
Sean Varano, Roger Williams University
Tim Bynum
Peter K. Manning

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2005

Comments

Published in: Security Journal, Volume 18, Number 4, 2005. P. 65-74

Abstract

Special events offer the potential for considerable threats to public safety. Perhaps no other special event rivals the Olympic Games in scope, duration, and potential for threat to communities, participants, and dignitaries. This paper reports on the results of a study of safety and security at the Salt Lake Olympic Games by a team of researchers with wide-ranging access to operations, personnel and documents from the security effort at the 2002 Winter Games. This paper focuses on three specific areas: changing definitions of safety and security during the Games; the development and maintenance of organizational structures and interaction; and lessons learned for other large-scale events. The goal of this paper is to document some of the challenges of establishing a temporary security organization. The paper concludes that building such organizations require for their success a major focus on creating a set of shared assumptions and working relationships.

Recommended Citation

Decker, Scott H., Jack R. Greene, Vincent J. Webb, Jeff Rojek, Jack McDevitt, Timothy S. Bynum, Sean P. Varano, and Peter K. Manning. 2005. "Safety and Security at Special Events: The Case of the Salt Lake City Olympic Games." Security Journal 18(4): 65-74.