Large Event Security - A Case Study of Spokane Events, WA

Large event security has become increasingly complex over the past 20 years. Security incidents have included headline tragedies such as the Las Vegas shooting in 2017 and the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. Spokane, Washington, has been no exception to the need to enhance guest security for large-scale events, as evidenced by the Hoopfest gang-related shooting in 2010 and the Martin Luther King Jr. Day bombing attempt in 2011. Balancing the interests of stakeholders has become challenging for event management professionals in both planning and operations phases. Security strategies and trainings designed for security and guest service staff are critical for the success of new protocols. Transparent communication to the public is crucial for the event's success and the guarantee of guest satisfaction. This case study aims to document the leadership decisions made to enhance security for large-scale events held in Downtown Spokane and the Spokane Arena. Focusing on several tipping points, the leadership decisions and implementation are chronicled as a case study, along with the decisions and protocols that continue to influence large event security in the Spokane area. This study will benefit other event planners and venues as they face security system upgrades, protocols, and implementation.

Is courtroom discourse an ‘oral’ or ‘literate’ register? The importance of sub-register

By applying Multi-Dimensional Analysis, this study has provided a thorough description of the lexico-grammatical characteristics of courtroom discourse to see to what extent it employs both linguistic features of oral registers and literate registers. In particular, this study focuses on language used in the four public sub-registers (opening statements, direct examinations, cross-examinations, closing arguments) of courtroom discourse and analyzes how oral/literate each sub-register is, instead of characterizing courtroom discourse as oral/literate overall. Detailed interpretation of results focuses on Dimension 1 (involved and interactive vs. informational production) and 2 (narrative vs. non-narrative discourse) as these two dimensions are identified as universal parameters of register variation (Biber, 2014). A corpus of high-profile courtroom trials was compiled for this study that includes the O. J. Simpson criminal trial, the Boston Marathon bombing trial, and the Oklahoma bombing trial.

The Impact of Terrorism on Individual Well-Being: Evidence from the Boston Marathon Bombing

A growing literature has concluded that terrorism affects the economy, yet less is known about its impact on individual welfare. This article estimates the impact of the 2013 Boston marathon bombing on well-being, exploiting representative daily data from the American Time Use Survey and Well-Being Supplement. Using a combined regression discontinuity and differences-in-differences design, with the 2012 Boston marathon as a counterfactual, we find an immediate reduction in well-being of a third of a standard deviation. In particular, happiness declined sharply and negative emotions rose significantly. While the effects do not persist beyond one week, they may entail adverse health and economic consequences.

Changes in Psychiatric Emergency Room Visits Following the Boston Marathon Bombing

ABSTRACTObjective:This study reviews patient encounters at a Boston-area community hospital Psychiatric Emergency Services (PES) following the Boston Marathon bombings, with the goal of describing the impact of terrorist attacks on PES encounters.Methods:All PES encounters for 2 months preceding and 2 months following the bombing were identified in the electronic medical record. Demographics, current and past psychiatric problems, and trauma history were assessed for all records. Encounters seen post-bombing were compared with those before the bombing.Results:Demographics, current and past psychiatric problems, and trauma history were not significantly different before versus after the bombing; 36 of 440 (8.2%) post-bombing encounters directly mentioned the bombings. New-onset posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms caused by the bombing occurred in only 4 encounters (0.9%).Conclusions:PES encounters after a terrorist event are likely to mirror those seen before a terrorist event, with only a minority of encounters presenting for new PTSD or acute stress disorder.

Crowdsourcing Investigations

In this paper the authors illustrate the ethical dilemmas that arise when large public investigations in a crisis are crowdsourced. The authors focus the variations in public opinion concerning the actions of two online groups during the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing. These groups collected and organized relief for victims, collected photos and videos taken of the bombing scene and created online mechanisms for the sharing and analysis of images collected online. They also used their large numbers and the affordances of the Internet to produce an answer to the question, “who was the perpetrator, and what kind of bomb was used?” The authors view their actions through public opinion, through sampling Twitter and applying a sentiment analysis to this data. They use this tool to pinpoint moments during the crisis investigation when the public became either more positively or negatively inclined toward the actions of the online publics. The authors use this as a surrogate, or proxy, for social approval or disapproval of their actions, which exposes large swings in public emotion as ethical lines are crossed by online publics.