Author: R.V. Baugus

FM Issue: January/February 2017

When IAVM President and CEO Brad Mayne talks about the Exhibitions and Meetings Safety and Security Initiative (EMSSI) that was launched in October, one of the main reasons he endorses for the safety and security protocols for the convention center world is to combat the proliferation of lone wolf attacks.

“It is a concern,” Mayne says. “We are seeing more and more of these types of attacks.”

The numbers don’t lie. According to the American Lone Wolf Terrorism Database, the number of all known American lone wolf attacks has risen from two in the 1950s to 35 in the 2010s, and counting. Further, according to the same database, the number killed was none in the 1950s to 115 in the current decade.

Convention centers typically have more entrance points than other types of public assembly venues. Through the years these venues have been sites of protests and demonstrations but thankfully have not been locations where a lone wolf has acted out. In its simplest definition, a lone wolf or lone-wolf terrorist is someone who prepares and commits violent acts alone, outside of any command structure and without material assistance from any group. However, he or she may be influenced or motivated by the ideology and beliefs of an external group, and may act in support of such a group.

“These are people who are going to act, generally, without direction,” says Kevin Mattingly, deputy director of the Phoenix Convention Center. “Essentially, they’re not a cell. They’re not under the control of someone. They may have prepared themselves because they feel like they’re going to act someday, but as far as predicting when they’re going to act out, I think that’s very difficult. Lone wolf by definition is someone who acts unilaterally or alone. That’s why we call them that. You can have someone who is radicalized and just living their life below the surface and then you don’t know what might trigger their decision to act out.”

The lone wolf has been lurking and stalking far too often in recent years.

Some try to blend in to the crowd they are attacking, to a degree.

On July 12, 2012, gunman James Holmes shot and killed 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, while dressed in attire from one of the characters of The Dark Knight Rises movie.

On June 17, 2015, gunman Dylann Roof joined a Wednesday night prayer service at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, before killing nine worshipers.

On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 people inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. He was reported to have attended the club previously and was known to some employees.

A lone wolf must be described as one person, but in the case of the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2013, brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamarlen Tsarnaev were responsible for killing three civilians when two bombs exploded about 12 second apart near the event’s finish line.

On July 7, 2016, gunman Micah Johnson fired upon and killed five police officers in Dallas who were patrolling a peaceful demonstration against deadly police violence.

There are of course similarities in the above in the sense that all attackers had their own unique reasons for wanting to inflict death. Then, there are the dissimilarities of the triggers and impulses that led to the actual actions.

“Something motivates them to act out,” Mattingly said. “You go to the one in Garland, Texas, where the two guys wanted to shoot the place up (during an event depicting various drawings of the prophet Muhammad). You can say that their motivation was to defend their religion, from their point of view. You look at the guy in Dallas who ambushed the officers and in this case, it was essentially police violence against African Americans.

“What this tells us is that any number of hot-button social, political, or religious issues could be what tips the scale for one of these people and causes them to act out. If we agree that’s the case, then it means that we have to broaden our scope of awareness beyond mere religious motivations.”

Mattingly says that such lone wolf attacks do not relate so much to an ability to infiltrate as much as that those individuals “just arrive.”

“We have an open and inclusive society,” he says. “Many of these people attack at their own places of employment (such as the San Bernadino shooting). They’re able to walk in the front door. They don’t really infiltrate so much as they just arrive. The shooting at the cartoon contest … they just arrived, they didn’t infiltrate.

“We have a society where you can buy a ticket or you can register for an event. You can drive up to the front door. So, there is no need to infiltrate. That’s really why everything is vulnerable because you don’t know what the tipping point might be.”

The ability to track such individuals before they rampage is something handled on the scope of the FBI and not by common individuals, says Mattingly.

“For the average building … there’s no tracking them,” he says. “There’s no identifying them. There’s no profile that fits. There’s none of these things. You might argue that you can harden your target and by being a harder target that they’ll choose another target. There might be some argument to that. It doesn’t mean that another target is not going to get hit. This is going to be the one that stumps the experts. The public safety authorities are not going to want to put that message out. That’s understandable because they don’t want to frighten people.

“You may not always know what the triggers are going to be, but you can have a general awareness of the world and understand that if you’re hosting a particular type of event that there might be a heightened security concern related to that so that you can take steps or try to convince your client to take steps, which can be very difficult. But it’s about when you walk in the front door, who’s the first person you want to see? Is that person a police officer or is that person in guest services to help with way find?”

Mattingly believes that being educated about your own clients is a huge first step.

“You have to understand your own clients and what’s being offered in your own building,” he says. “But picking up or trying to spot someone who’s been scouting your venue is really hard. I’m looking outside now and we have this huge high school group here. Every third kid has a camera. Those that don’t have an actual camera have a cell phone. They’re taking selfies and pictures and whatever. I mean, I’m watching high school kids walking down the street carrying boxes and I don’t know what the heck is going on.”

Mattingly says the challenge going forward is a unique one of getting into the mindset of a lone wolf.

“Just try to understand what their next move might be,” he says. “We were focused on bombs on airplanes and they responded with knives, pistols and assault weapons.

“The message I would put out there for people worried about lone wolf attacks is that you should worry about that and your best way to prepare for that is to prepare for the things that you have to face every day. If you can get good at handling things every day, then the next step is to get good at handling emergencies that happen maybe once a month. The better you get at that then the better you’re going to be in a catastrophic thing that might come along.”