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Could anything have been done to prevent the Bourbon Street terror attack? Northeastern professor Carey Rappaport says there are concrete and creative ways to enhance security in public spaces.
New Orleans is still reeling from a terror attack that involved a 42-year-old Army veteran driving a pickup truck through a Bourbon Street crowd on New Year’s Day, killing at least 15 and injuring dozens more before being shot and killed by police.
The driver, identified as Shamsud-Dun Bahar Jabbar, a 42-year-old Texas man who had served in the U.S. Army for eight years before being honorably discharged, had posted videos prior to the attack in which he “pledged allegiance to ISIS.” He had an Islamic State flag in his truck, as well as firearms, authorities say, and had planted explosives at two nearby intersections, neither of which went off, before driving into the crowd.
As details about the violence and the suspect have been revealed, there is still a major looming question: What, if anything, could have been done to prevent the attack?
Carey Rappaport, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University, says protecting vulnerable “soft targets,” i.e. hospitals, schools and public spaces like Bourbon Street, is an ongoing challenge but one that needs to be addressed.
“There are certainly political and ethical and privacy considerations that have to be thought of,” says Rappaport, deputy director of SENTRY, Soft Target Engineering to Neutralize the Threat Reality. “It is inherently in conflict with privacy and civil liberty aspects. That is, you can certainly make everybody secure by having an armed guard escort everyone everywhere, but that’s silly. If you have a lot of video surveillance, that helps, but people don’t like to be surveilled that much.”
In a location like Bourbon Street, a 12-block stretch of highly trafficked pedestrian activity, there are some solutions. Police cars or larger vehicles, like dump trucks full of sand, are often used to block off sections of roadway during events. Bollards, steel posts embedded in the ground, are a more permanent and reliable form of physical security, although the bollards blocking Bourbon Street had been removed for repair prior to the attack.
“Bollards work,” Rappaport says. “Maybe a tank can get by those, but regular cars will get smashed up trying to run into them.”
Rappaport notes that in a situation like this, physical barriers are the most common –– and cost-effective –– solution that cities tend to deploy. He wouldn’t be surprised to see more police cars blocking Bourbon Street next New Year’s Eve.
“It does seem like with a wall of barriers that’s serious enough you can prevent vehicles from being weaponized,” Rappaport says.
The problem is that vehicles are not the only threat in public spaces: “It does seem like you’d also need to stop people who are carrying concealed weapons under their clothing as well,” he adds.
In most cases where security is a concern, portal-based detection systems, like metal detectors at entryways, and radar detection systems are the solution. But in a large public gathering place it’s not feasible or practical to send large crowds through security checkpoints without raising public concern and city budgets.
So, can anything be done to truly prevent another attack like this? Groups like SENTRY are hard at work to find new methods of protection, but there are other solutions that go outside the box –– or build an entirely new box, Rappaport says.
“A lot of it is looking at it from an architectural point of view and making a way so that maybe there aren’t too many people assembled and vulnerable in one place at one time,” Rappaport says. “It’s a little like Disney, where you have multiple rooms to go through before you actually get on the ride.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean completely redesigning Bourbon Street, he notes. Sometimes something as simple as stairs can make all the difference.
“You don’t see a lot of vehicular trauma inside buildings up a staircase,” Rappaport says. “It’s hard to drive a car upstairs. So maybe you just need three steps across each end of Bourbon Street –– three steps up, three steps down –– and pedestrians might not even notice that and it would get rid of all the cars.”