As part of several reviews of 2024, Professional Security Magazine editor Mark Rowe writes a companion piece to his review of event security – picking up that arguably the greatest threat to having a good time is not crime or event terrorism but, ironically, the sheer popularity of some events that creates dangerously dense crowds, such as at the Notting Hill Carnival each August.
At the London Assembly police and crime committee recently – as part of a session about the policing of protest – Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist described the Notting Hill Carnival to Assembly members as ‘an incredibly challenging event to police’; he added that ‘probably the most concerning element, the thing that I am always most worried about with Carnival, is crowd density’.
While Twist did not deny the crime, including serious crime including leading to deaths, it was all the more striking that he said police had to step in ‘a number of times …. to save life’ because crowds got too dense; and what worried him most was ‘the potential for a mass casualty event’. Indeed, the two are connected because as Twist told the committee, on occasion the streets were so packed that ‘officers literally could not move due to the level of crowding’ and could not respond even to a crime. Twist took care to point out that crowd safety and management is the responsibility of the Carnival organiser, and not the police; and he noted the (chronic) lack of stewarding, and that police have ‘to backfill areas where the organiser has been unable to provide sufficient stewarding or crowd control’. Mr Twist’s comments were echoed by former inspector of police, Matt Parr.
One of the Assembly members, Unmesh Desai, also pointed to shortcomings of the organising besides too few stewards; ‘lack of bins, fly-tipping, lack of toilets’. Twist agreed that the number of Carnival stewards was ‘nowhere near enough to manage the size of crowd’, in the hundreds of thousands. The outgoing deputy mayor for policing Sophie Linden noted that London Mayor Sadiq Khan ‘has increased the funding to Notting Hill Carnival Limited and maintained it for the last year as well at £946,000 for event and stewarding’.
What’s crucial for the safety of a mass event is foreknowledge of how many will attend – while never an exact science, because the weather may put even ticket-holders off attending if it’s too cold, or rainy, organisers like to have at least an idea of crowd numbers, so as to plan for stewarding, or even to know if safety is a problem. Hence you don’t get in the (stewarded and gated – you have to show ID with your ticket to security staff) viewing areas of the new year’s fireworks in central London without a ticket (starting at £20).
Lewes Bonfire
Ahead of the Lewes Bonfire on November 5, the authorities in East Sussex sought to control the crowds by asking train operators not to call at Lewes on the evening of November 5; and offering a live stream on Youtube. Despite stewarding, the streets of the historic centre of Lewes simply were never built to take such numbers that have descended on the county town in recent years. The disgraceful disorder outside and inside Wembley at the England-Italy final of the Euros football in July 2021 was different from Lewes in that few, if any, of those going to Lewes do not intend to create a crush; while the uncounted thousands that went to Wembley without tickets were reckless, as some must have been who went to Brixton Academy (pictured) in December 2022, to see an Asake concert, that killed two. Each venue afterwards carried out remedial work; however, the uncomfortable fact is that if too many people get it into their head to go to the same venue at the same time to see something too fashionable to miss, the risk is of another, even worse, tragedy.
