The September 2024 Universities at the Met seminar will be held at New Scotland Yard (Ground Floor) at 5pm on the 11th of September 2024. The event is open to all, and is expected to conclude by 6:30pm.

​"Perceived hostile threats and public behaviour''
 
Link to tickets and more information 

Please confirm if you are attending in person or online.  If you are attending in person, please ensure you bring photographic ID.  Failure to do so may result in you being refused entry to the venue.
If you are joining online, a Microsoft Teams link will be provided to you in your confirmation email.

Speakers include:

Professor John Drury - Professor of Social Psychology and Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange at the University of Sussex
This talk will describe new research on public flight incidents in response to perceived hostile threats. In the UK and Europe in the 2010s, there were a large number false alarm incidents, where people thought there was a marauding terrorist attack. Some of these incidents involved injury or fatality as well as being disruptive and distressing. These kinds of incidents, have not been investigated until now, despite their importance to emergency planning. While they are widely described as ‘panic’, that does not explain them. I will describe a new analysis of ten years of false alarm incidents in the UK and a detailed case study of the 2017 Oxford Street false alarm to address three questions: (1) When do false alarms occur? (2) How does fear and flight behaviour spread in these incidents? (3) How do members of the public behave towards each other in them? I will use the research to derive a series of practical recommendations for practitioners and policymakers.
 
Professor Brooke Rogers - Professor of Behavioural Science and Security in the Department of War Studies at King's College London and Police Science Council member
Professor Rogers is a social psychologist with an exceptional track record of designing and delivering large-scale collaborative research projects. Her work focuses on perceptions of and responses to risk and threat, and risk communication. The majority of these projects investigate public and practitioner responses to low likelihood, high-impact events such as chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) accidents or attacks. Others explore protecting crowded places; business continuity resilience; pathways into violent radicalisation; insider threat; pandemics; and community resilience. Professor Rogers is the Chair of the Cabinet Office (CO) National Risk Assessment and National Security Risk Assessment Behavioural Science Expert Group, and the Home Office Science Advisory Council (HOSAC). She maintains membership across a number of advisory groups including the Home Office OSCT Analysis and Research Programme Challenge Board and also advises international organisations including the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA), the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).