Stadium Security: How can your stadium benefit from drone detection?

Quick recap: In the first article, you examined Issue #1: Drone threats specific to stadiums. In the second article in this series, you weighed Issue #2: Economic impacts on stadiums. In the third article, you explored Issue #3: Drone policies and safety procedures to help your team better prepare for drone threats. Then, we evaluated Issue #4: Drone detection technologies for stadium environments.

In this post, we will look at the benefits of drone detection and survey how the technology can help secure the airspace around your stadium.

Early Warnings are Critical

The aerial threat of drones presents stadiums with different requirements for detection, assessment, and response. The key to dealing with drone incursions is to detect them as early as possible and intercept them before they can make their way to their intended target.

The quality of detection, assessment, and response should be proportionate to the level of threat and their worst-case scenario. Early detection is critical to assessing the situation and applying the appropriate response.

The best practices of security professionals follow a similar countermeasure sequence when dealing with threats:

• Deterrence
• Detection
• Assessment
• Response
• Evidence

If you can detect the device and identify the drone operator, you can start the trail of obtaining actionable intelligence through standard investigation procedures including:

• Due diligence investigation on the operator
  
  • Background Checks:
    • Are there previous known incidents against your venue with this person/drone?
    • Do they have a criminal history?
    • Are they affiliated with causes against your organization?
  • Social Media Checks:
    • Are they posting drone flight video on social media accounts?
    • Are they posting grievance or violence towards your organization?
    • What kinds of groups are they affiliated with online?
• Response to drone operator
  • No trespass orders
  • Legal remedies
  • Social Media monitoring

Being able to identify and investigate the drone operator in real-time provides vital information to assess the threat, employ appropriate mitigation, and respond with legal actions.

Benefits of drone detection:

What kind of data does the system collect?

Drone detection technology allows stadium operators to continuously scan the surrounding airspace for drones. The drone detection system rapidly identifies UAS communication links and provides telemetry data of the unmanned aircraft, such as:

• Drone location
• Drone pilot location
• Speed
• Path

This real-time data stream helps security officials make informed decisions and responses as soon as possible. Security teams can capture and retain this data as evidence to take legal action against drone intruders.

Drone detection helps you:

• Identify drone and pilot activity
• Alert security team to the drone make, model, altitude, drone and pilot GPS location
• Improve reaction time by providing advanced warning and alerts
• Provide real-time monitoring of drone activity to allow actionable intervention
• Record and maintains data to use as evidence

Want to learn more about drone detection? Follow along to our Las Vegas Incident Case Study to further explore drone detection in action. See a real-life example of how drone detection can help in each step of the security process.