Brazil world Cup 2014
Being home to some of the world’s most dangerous cities and criminal gangs, and with some alarming crime rates; is the Brazilian government’s £600m security budget enough to ensure the safety of visitors for the 2014 World Cup?
The Brazilian government’s commitment to giving peace of mind to fans and teams travelling to the country for the competition, and gaining FIFA’s trust that the tournament will be safe, are high on the list of priorities for organisers. The programme developed and already in place to help make this happen appears to be taking effect. A huge clamp down on Police corruption is seeing many raids and arrests of officers suspected of being involved in aiding serious organised crime. Pair this with the initiation of the training and certificating 30,000 security officers and it would seem that they are heading in the right direction.
The 2010 World Cup in South Africa, Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine and the 2013 African Cup of Nations all passed smoothly and largely trouble free after all facing scrutiny over security fears. The question has to be, will the lessons learnt and tactics used be transferable, appliable, and robust enough to tackle the threats harboured in Brazil?
Brazil 2014 has said that all of the issues would be addressed to cope with the thousands of fans entering the country for the World Cup.
“Security has become an ever-increasing issue for major sporting events in the past decade,” the Organising Committee said in a statement.
“This has increased the level of information exchange between countries that have recently hosted events to ensure public safety.”
At the last World Cup in South Africa in 2010, the Government invested 640 million rand (£45 million/$73 million/€57 million) to deploy 31,000 police officials during the tournament and set aside a total security budget of 1.3 billion rand (£92 million/$150 million/€110 million).
As always here at Prime we like to have our finger on the pulse and have already been involved in coordinating packages and options for our media clients. We will undoubtedly be involved in training journalists covering the event and will hopefully have a good level of security provision at the tournament.
Please feel free to contact me for the latest updates, security or training advice.
James Spensley
Security and Training Consultant
