Stadium Safety Basics

Daniels Law

With the FIFA World Cup, Super Bowl 60, and America 250 celebrations all converging in 2026, law enforcement and security professionals are confronting a hard truth: the systems we depend on to keep people safe at large-scale events are disturbingly fragile. A recent Police1 analysis identifies six critical vulnerability areas that should be on every premises liability practitioner’s radar.

The six vulnerabilities: communication infrastructure failures (incompatible radio systems, traffic overload); cybersecurity threats targeting venue operations and access control; power grid and utility outages; drone threats capable of delivering payloads into crowded spaces; inadequate crowd management and public messaging; and broader emergency scenarios from weather events to active shooters.

The article features Atlanta Deputy Chief Charles Hampton, who will oversee security for eight World Cup matches. Hampton’s approach is instructive—he traveled to Germany and the UK to study crowd management techniques, then discovered through testing that his department’s mounted patrol horses were spooked by stadium conditions, prompting additional training. His message is clear: assumptions kill. As RAND researcher Bob Harrison warns, the biggest obstacle to unified response remains the decentralized, fragmented nature of U.S. law enforcement.

The litigation takeaway? Each of these six vulnerabilities represents a foreseeable risk that venue operators and event promoters have a duty to address. When a communication breakdown delays emergency response, when a cybersecurity gap disables access control, or when inadequate crowd messaging triggers panic, the question for a jury is straightforward: did the defendant take reasonable steps to address known, documented risks? This Police1 article—and the CISA guidance it builds upon—makes it increasingly difficult for defendants to claim these failures were unforeseeable.

Source: “The Systems That Can Fail: Six Vulnerabilities to Address Before Major Events,” Police1, November 22, 2025.

AI assisted with this post.