Chicago Bolsters Security for Lollapalooza Music Festival
Festival-goers should expect enhanced security at Lollapalooza this weekend in Chicago, as more police, fencing, bag restrictions and airport-style screening are added to the annual Grant Park event.
According to the Chicago Tribune, city officials hope that the increased security will ease the minds of concertgoers following news that the attacker in the Las Vegas mass shooting had also booked rooms at a hotel along Michigan Avenue, across the street from the 2017 Lollapalooza.
On Friday, CPD Superintendent Eddie Johnson said there were no known threats to the festival. “We have pushed back the perimeter and we’ll have eyes in the sky, so we’ll be keeping a close look on it. But I just want to caution people, that with things of this nature, you can never have 100-percent guaranteed security, but what you do is try to be prepared in the event that something does go astray,” says Johnson, after a news conference last week. “So I think that we put things in place now to keep everybody safe. We want everybody to have an enjoyable time.”
According to a Center for the Study of the Drone report, 11 agencies in Cook County, Illinois, are using drones, and they are likely to be in use during the music festival.
The Tribune reports that festival security plans extend beyond the park grounds, including increased police patrols on Michigan Avenue, security checks of Grant Park garages (which are used as shelters if the festival is evacuated for storms), and canvasses of hotels that provide a bird’s eye view of the park.
More than 100,000 music fans are expected at Lollapalooza for each of its four days, making it one of the country’s largest urban festivals held since the Las Vegas massacre in October 2017.
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