Festival Republic to hold second Crime At Major UK Music Festivals Conference

Festival organiser Melvin Benn has been talking to eFestivals about next year's second Crime At Major UK Music Festivals Conference.

Melvin Benn is Managing Director of Festival Republic and his events include Reading and Leeds Festivals, Latitude, Electric Picnic, Big Chill, Hove in Norway, and he's contracted to help manage the Glastonbury Festival.

The inaugural Crime At Major UK Music Festivals Conference was held in May this year and next year's event will be held at the Royal Berkshire Conference Centre at the Madejski Stadium in Reading on Sunday 25th January and hopes to gather all UK promoters who run large scale, professional festivals, their security companies and the relevant planning, intelligence and operational officers from their local police forces to discuss combating organised and strategic crime at UK music festivals, and in particular cut down on ticket touting and theft during next year's summer season.

"The first event earlier this year was a great success," says Benn. "The key thing is to get all the police forces, security companies, and promoters information sharing. As a result of the last conference there was much more information sharing and integration across those who attended. The next conference will further develop our intelligence sharing to further address organised crime."

This year the particular problem area Benn explained is ticket touting both online and outside festivals before the events happen. He said, "For those who have saved up and bought tickets believing they are going to an event only to get there and get turned away from the festival because they have fake tickets is the main thing we want to address. It's very upsetting for those it happens to, and it effects their perception of the festival. We want to see how we can prevent fake ticket sales from happening."

Benn also pointed out that the number of criminals involved wasn't large, he pointed out that, "The interesting thing is that the number of people involved in this organised crime are only about twenty people, and it's those people we want to stop."

There's also the problem of people selling poor quality fake merchandise, and although tent theft is also on the agenda, Benn revealed, "It's actually a much smaller problem, festival organisers have got much better at preventing theft, like any society there's still opportunist theft, but the number of times this occurs at festivals these days is much reduced thanks to security measures."

Benn was happy to reassure festival goers that the conference was about prevention, and that crime at festivals is actually very rare, saying "At festivals the number of people who are a victim of crime is very low, particularly tent theft which is surprising considering most people are living under canvas with no locks on their homes. The crime figures at all festivals is incredibly low. But as festival promoters we have a duty to constantly keep trying to reduce crime."

The festival promoters and police forces invited to attend include Glastonbury, Leeds, Reading, Latitude, Bestival, Rockness, Download, Isle of Wight, T in the Park, T4 on the Beach, V Festival, WOMAD, Glade Festival, Creamfields, Secret Garden Party, Global Gathering, The Big Chill and Electric Picnic, and the event is free for all festival organisers to attend.

Benn will chair proceedings alongside Chief Superintendent Andy Battle of West Yorkshire Police. The event will be split into two sessions with the morning structured around working groups divided by agency – E.g. police forces, security companies and promoters in separate groups to review crime during 2009 and whether intelligence sharing worked for them, and how it might be improved in the future – while the afternoon session will include short presentations from a number of speakers.

Topics to be covered include: crime trends and tactics during the 2009 season; intelligence sharing systems and results; touts, bootlegging, theft from tent, fake ticketing websites; connections between touts, drugs, tent theft; organised criminal networks; crime prevention techniques and the modus operandi of criminals; and the use of ANPR (Automatic Car Numberplate Recognition).

Festival goers are best advised to treat offers of tickets for sold out events with great suspicion, and only make online purchases from trusted sites, and not part with their money once a festival has sold out. If you can't get tickets to one festival then why not consider buying tickets to another festival instead?

eFestivals also spoke to Melvin Benn about next year's Festival Republic festivals and you can read the interview in full here next week.

Please Note: eFestivals only links to reputable ticket agents or an event's own box office, we do not deal with ticket touts or advertise them. So you can have more confidence about the tickets bought from eFestivals than you can from any other festivals website.

Do not purchase tickets from unofficial or secondary ticket outlets or auction sites as they often are unable to supply the tickets, and might not even give you a refund - there are a lot of dodgy operators out there! You can find a list of agents we think you should avoid on our forums by clicking here.

Latest Updates