The ambush-style slaying of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in front of a Midtown Manhattan hotel on Dec. 4th was doubtless one of the most shocking events of 2024.
But this personal tragedy for Thompson’s family and friends also sent shockwaves through the meetings community, leaving some planners wondering, could it happen at my event?
“What kind of ‘duty of care’ do we as planners have to keep our people safe?” asks Catherine Jones, president and owner of the Dallas-based Edventives Group and a member of Prevue’s editorial advisory board. “I’m concerned because I’m an independent planner… and I find it surprising that this CEO was not staying at the headquarter hotel. It’s interesting that he didn’t have a security detail when he was getting death threats,” she added. “That should have been the responsibility of UnitedHealthcare.”
The head of a private security company agrees.
“Now that an incident like this has occurred, and with surprising support of the shooter online, it’s critical that other executives at UnitedHealthcare and other healthcare companies get a security detail until some time passes,” says Lee Andrews, CEO of AGS Security in Los Angeles.
Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the brazen shooting, health insurers removed information about their top executives from company websites, canceled in-person meetings with shareholders and advised all employees to work from home temporarily, The Associated Press reported. AP also obtained a police bulletin saying law enforcement feared that the Dec. 4 shooting could “inspire a variety of extremists and grievance-driven malicious actors to violence.”
Andrews says that before this incident, his company got some, but not many, security-detail requests for high-ranking members of a company’s C-suite—requests often related to the nature and number of direct threats received as well as other factors.
“It was highly dependent on the size of the company, the industry and potential threats,” Andrews says. “In [Thompson’s case], while it can be a controversial industry, there weren’t specific individuals that are in the limelight in the same way [celebrities] are.”
Security: When and How?
Jones believes that “lesser luminaries” may still need security, and that fellow planners might want to consider things like private transportation for their VIPs during an event.
“We have to figure out what the best practices are,” she says. “If there was some kind of meetings information data breach… that’s really scary,” she adds, pointing to the killer’s ability to pinpoint the exact moment Thompson would be crossing the street to attend his event—an adjunct function that was not part of the meeting’s general programming.
“It was very early, too early for the start of the program,” she says. “So [the killer] had to know the correct time and the correct door.”
For companies planning to implement security measures going forward in 2025, Andrews from AGS has some tips.
“It all comes down to planning. A security plan can be quite detailed and you need an expert to help,” he says. “Considerations like line control, temporary security fencing, bike rack blockades, metal detector positions, clean zones and identifying potential breach zones are all things that need to be considered, not just the amount of officers and where they should be posted.”
Jones, however, sees a larger issue beyond the parameters of the UnitedHealthcare CEO incident.
“Now that this culture of violence has been normalized, this is something the planner can’t fix,” she says, adding, “Not all violence that may happen [at a meeting] is this extreme, but as planners, we need to look at reasonable duty of care and our possible liability.”
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