Football clubs use award winning crowd safety and security tech to help protect stadia and training grounds and keep fans safe.
Halo Solutions, the UK’s leading crowd safety and security operations platform, has scored a hat-trick after Premier League club Nottingham Forest FC, Championship club Birmingham City FC and Chelsea FC became the latest football clubs to integrate its award-winning incident and task management software, Halo (v5). Chelsea FC will use Halo (v5) for the 24/7 security contract at Stamford Bridge as well as Chelsea’s Cobham Training Ground.
The clubs will use Halo’s cutting-edge safety and security technology to:
- Help protect and keep fans safe managing all incidents observed at matches or day-to-day on their premises.
- Create and monitor digitised security, match day safety and pre-match checks.
- Enhance and bolster existing robust crowd safety and security measures.
- Streamline all reporting procedures, including reporting codes available to the public, volunteers and wider club staff to report suspicious activity, anti-social behaviour or safety incidents.
- Build clear and complete debriefs on every match day or month of operations for presentation at Safety Advisory Group (SAGs).
The ground-breaking operations software is already being used 24/7-365 right across the English Football Leagues by clubs such as Watford FC, West Bromwich Albion and Mansfield Town FC, as well as clubs in the MLS (Major League Soccer, USA) and in security operations at stadia and venues across the UK.
Halo has quickly established itself as one of the leading crowd safety and security technology companies in the world, with the Halo incident and task management system handling over 2,500 events 88,000 incidents and 550,000 tasks for some of the world’s biggest venue and event operations last year.
OCS Group Senior Security Manager (Chelsea Football Club), Bakary Bah, said: “We’ve seen fantastic results implementing the Halo System into match-day and everyday security operations across Stamford Bridge and Cobham Training Ground. Halo’s user-friendly appearance and flexible ability to ensure all our safety and security management is streamlined into one place was a huge reason for us choosing Halo over other platforms. We run our site security programme to the highest possible standard, and the reporting capabilities of Halo help us to manage and audit all incidents, tasks, patrols and activities continuously all within one, easy-to-use platform.”
Halo was founded by Lloyd Major, a former national counterterrorism police officer, crowd safety and event security adviser with 20 years of policing experience, including police training and public order command at major sporting events. During this time, he became the first operational police planner in the UK to obtain a Master’s degree in Emergency Planning and Management and developed a totally new process for threat assessment at public events, which became national policing policy.
Major also worked around England in Operational Planning Units, including sitting on Safety Advisory Groups (SAGs) for specialist planning advice for thousands of major sporting and entertainment events, major tournaments, protests and operations. This extensive knowledge and experience was then channelled into creating the Halo System to address key challenges in crowd safety, incident management and security for venues, stadiums and arenas – so they can get the right information to the right people at the right time, easily.
Halo CEO and Founder, Lloyd Major, said: “We are delighted to have added Chelsea, Nottingham Forest and Birmingham City to the growing list of football clubs that use Halo’s technology to provide safety and security to everyone across their sites. Clubs are expected to provide the very best crowd safety and security initiatives within their operations for fan safety. We are proud to support even more clubs on that mission, bringing digital simplicity to both matchday and everyday use with our platform. It is reassuring to see such a proactive and robust approach to safety and security from these clubs in the running of their stadia, the safety of their visitors and event experiences.”
The Halo (v5) software system was designed with public safety and security at its core to assist with rapid decision-making, with the ability to integrate all streams of information and intelligence into one place to enable faster responses – to ultimately protect the public and save lives. The Halo System acts as a central command-and-control function that operates from a standard laptop, tablet or smart phone, and brings together more than 10 different systems into one, with over 75 client-led features. Halo integrates monitoring and recording of multiple feeds of information across a venue, from security, CCTV and live drone feeds to health and safety, cleaning, medical, public reports, ticket scanning and staff accreditation – and next year will include crowd management, crowd density, flow, sentiment, mood and capacity.
It means that when an incident occurs, all the actions, updates and decisions taken by staff are recorded in one location for more effective decision-making, transparency and debriefing capability with a clear and complete audit trail. It also provides an invaluable reporting mechanism on crowd safety, health and safety and general incident logging across all custom types faced by a venue. This allows operations directors, event managers and venue owners to customise the system to their needs and get the most meaningful information to positively impact on public safety. Critically, in the event of a major incident it can also provide vital evidential data to support the decisions taken by the organisation.
Halo Solutions has played an important role in protecting people and keeping them safe at some of the biggest events on the planet, with major events around the world, including the coronation of King Charles III, the Eurovision song contest, FIFA World Cup fan zones in Qatar, the Miami F1 Grand Prix, Silverstone’s British Grand Prix and Moto GP – to mention just a handful. It has also protected fans at some of the UK’s biggest entertainment events, from Notting Hill Carnival and Glastonbury to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, funeral of HM Queen Elizabeth II and coronation of HM King Charles III.
The crowd and event safety platform has also been deployed at the NEC in Birmingham, ExCeL London, Motorpoint Arena Nottingham and ACC Liverpool to keep millions of visitors safe each year. The Halo (v5) crowd safety platform has also played a major role in protecting the public across major rail transport infrastructure and stations across the UK.
