Kids frisked at music show
Arena: Patting down children should not have happened
Concert-goers were stunned to see young children and teens being frisked by security staff at Sunday night’s Little Mix show. A Herald reviewer at the concert saw children being patted down right next to their parents.
“It was so crowded. They were trying to get everyone through quickly so you didn’t really notice,” she said.
“It wasn’t until I really looked back and thought, ‘That’s a really weird sight, to see people feeling [the children’s] legs and stomach’.”
Another parent told the Herald that while he saw others being frisked, his children, aged 11 and 13, were not. They did, however, have to undergo a full-body scan.
Michael Pleciak sent his wife Penny Lewis photos of their two daughters Nina (13) and Eva (11) Pleciak being subjected to the rigorous security check and said a member of security staff told them Little Mix had insisted on full-body security scans for everybody coming in.
Pleciak says: “They just scanned [ our girls], but . . . you would think they would have more female security staff doing this, given the audience is overwhelmingly teenaged girls or women.”
The parents say their girls “seemed to understand because of Ariana Grande” and the bombing at her Manchester concert this year.
However, Brendan Hines, general manager for Spark Arena, said that was definitely not the reason.
He told the Herald children being patted down “just shouldn’t be happening, so if it did it was completely inadvertent”.
“It’s certainly not policy — it’s actually quite the opposite. The policy is that kids don’t get frisked,” he said.
Hines said the friskings might have occurred when unbriefed security staff were pulled from other areas of the stadium to help clear a backlog at the front doors.
“The only thing we can work out . . . there were large crowds out the front, it was a cold night, we were really keen to get [the crowd] in as quickly as we could, so we did pull some security staff from other areas that may not have been briefed particularly well.”
While they hadn’t had any official complaints, they would look into the claims.
Spark Arena’s official policy is that anyone under 16 shouldn’t be searched. The venue’s policy prohibits alcohol, illegal substances, bottles, gang patches or colours, fireworks, laser lights, weapons, illegal substances, musical instruments, modes of personal transport, eg skateboards, sporting equipment, tagging equipment, selfie sticks, branded food and drinks, professional cameras and video cameras.