Can policy prevent another Astroworld tragedy? - CNN

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Washington (CNN)Nine deaths. A flurry of lawsuits. Many, many unanswered questions.

Last week's Astroworld Music Festival tragedy in Houston has touched off a new debate at the intersection of venue safety, artist responsibility and crowd etiquette.

Travis Scott has maintained he did not know what was happening in the crowd during his set, disputing city officials' account of his role in the deadly surge. But until authorities are done investigating the tragedy, definitive answers are in short order.

For help understanding the role that policy plays in shaping events like Astroworld -- and the role that it could play moving forward -- CNN turned to Gil Fried, a crowd management expert and professor at the University of West Florida. Our conversation, conducted over the phone and lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.

CNN: As a jumping off point, can you tell me what goes into planning an event at the scale of an Astroworld festival?

GF: I mean, there's a lot of moving parts. If we're taking a look at like a World Series or Super Bowl, you're looking at a couple of years' worth of planning. For an event like this, you don't need a couple of years, but you need a number of months. And it could take about a year out, I mean just for finalizing the date, making sure there's no major conflicts, things like that.

But the earnest thing will take a number of months. One is pulling all the rights permits. You need to have the staff. You need to get all the sponsors. You need to get all the marketing, ticketing stock. I mean there's just so many different variables and the most important, at least in this context, is you have to get all the right players together to meet and to address all the different issues.

And part of that is, in our industry, we have something called an "Event file." Normally you keep a file from past events and then you can look at them and say, "What went right? What went wrong? What can we do going forward to make sure the event is the best possible event?" Whether it's for marketing, whether it's fan support or if it's violence -- you want to be able to have that, so you can look at it and then judge it: "Okay, what do we have to do going forward?"

We know that in this context, the artist has had past problems, whether it was at Astroworld or other concerts, where he encouraged fans not to listen to security. If you knew of that going in, then you have to take more significant steps to try to minimize the potential for issues.

CNN: Can you speak to the laws that event organizers or artists have to stay within? Are there laws?

GF: So I'd love to say, "This is America, we're so advanced." We're nowhere close to what it's like in -- primarily in England -- but they also have it in Canada and Australia: There's a thing called the Green Guide, which really sets forward from the federal government in those countries what facilities have to do, how they have to manage their events, what constitutes a safe event, because they've had some major tragedies in England and they utilize this guide to help them prepare for, and address, any possible issues that might arise in the future.

And so we see it all too often that our industry has seen a number of very important steps, but it also is way behind the times. So we don't have a national policy; most states don't have a policy such as "This is how we're going to respond in case of X, Y, or Z." We don't have that.

So what do we have? We have a hodgepodge of industry best practices that are advocated by different organizations and groups.

One that is very well-regarded is the National Fire Protection Association that says you have to have one trained crowd manager for every 250 people in attendance. So if you're going to have 25,000 people attending, you need to have at least 100 trained crowd managers.

CNN: It's pretty surprising that there's really nothing at the state or the national level for something like this.

GF: Yeah so, often times when they do develop something is after a tragedy. And I think that's frustrating for a lot of people when there aren't set national laws or something like that. But I think also we have to remember that the reason why there aren't national laws is that every venue is different. Some venues you can't bring in a handgun, others say you can.

And so everything -- you always have to balance it out. And our industry normally does a pretty good job of it. This case, I think it might be a different story. ... The evidence was clear that it got out of hand a lot earlier with the crashing of the gates. Second, during the performance, you had visible signs of ambulance presence and other presence with flashing lights in the middle of the crowd. And the artist did not stop. They did not turn on all the houselights, and from what I understand, there were efforts to try to stop it. And the police chief was concerned about stopping the concert because of the possibility of a mob, but that could be diffused very, very quickly by the artist.

And that's, I think, my big concern here. I handled a case a number of years ago with Eminem where there was a crowd rush at an Eminem concert down South. And a number of people got injured, and he ended up making a game out of it.

He said, "Okay, everyone, I'm going to start a new dance with you. Okay. Two steps back, one step forward, two steps back, one step forward." And he was trying to alleviate the pressure of everyone that was pushed up against the barricade by doing that. And an artist can do that. An artist can say, "Hey folks, I'm going to stop the concert for a couple minutes because we have an issue here. You know what, I'll make it up for you guys. I'll sing an extra song at the end, but I need you to listen to me. Everyone, let's turn on the houselights. Let's do X, let's do Y." Artists can do that and that's not going to trigger a mob. People are going to be respectful and listen to that.

CNN: Do you think some sort of new policy at some level could emerge from this tragedy?

GF: I hope so. And our industry has been very good about self-policing ourselves.

And I think that is a concern, is that when the government does it, will they do a good job? If the government were to do it with the industry, and get their involvement from a broad swath of the industry, maybe that could be a strong benefit. But we just don't know enough about the facts to jump to conclusion, to blame the industry, to blame concerts, to point fingers. That's what everyone tries to do in these kinds of cases. And everyone tries to play Monday morning quarterback and say, "If you would have done X, it would not have happened." I've been in enough of these cases where it's normally not just one thing.

And so, I would like to work with the governments, whether it's state or federal government, but let's do it in a smart and strategic way, rather than just having someone up on high saying, "I think this is a great mandate. You should do X," without our input.

CNN: I have to imagine part of the challenge with an artist like Travis Scott is that part of the apparent appeal of his shows is an element of things being out of control. I mean, that's kind of a hard thing to discourage when it's a feature and not a bug.

GF: People like, sometimes, confrontation. And our society is getting more and more violent and you could see it in this situation. I understand the issue of -- this was part of his game plan, so to speak, is that I'm going to get people hopped up and juiced up and they're going to be energized and feel great and damn the rules.

Well, if people are more prone and interested in violence, this could be a way to help foster that. And that's going to be very sad because if it's going to happen here, why not at a movie theater? Why not at a restaurant?

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