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Would you feel safe on Bourbon St. today? [1]
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Date: 2025-01-03
Jesse Kirsch reports from Bourbon St.
This disturbed me. City officials reopened Bourbon St. last night and while no public threats were reported, it certainly looked like the potential to thwart one was not there. Good Morning Joe had a segment where Jesse Kirsch did a walk around Bourbon St. the first night it was reopened. According to his report, there were several points along the side streets where a copycat killer could have easily got a vehicle onto it.
This new kind of homemade terrorism is not hard to duplicate. It is hard to stop, especially if no one makes a concerted effort to make it hard to penetrate a perimeter where hundreds of people are gathered in clusters of potential targets. We do live in a vulnerable society, and a large gathering of any sort presents such an opportunity for mass casualty events. We know it is impossible to cover all vulnerabilities in all situations, but any place where large gatherings are anticipated, or especially places that are a constant draw for crowds should have a secure perimeter without obvious holes in it.
Bollards blocking a street are useless if the sidewalk is wide enough for a normal car to drive on. Common sense should have told the New Orleans police that, and if there had only been a second police car there the terrorist would have had to drive through it before he could carry out his sickening plan. Maybe he would have been stopped or he might have not tried if he didn’t see a weakness to exploit. Obviously every contingency can’t be anticipated, but it would be good to have better standards for minimum requirements to secure a public event. Of course having security on paper is worthless if it’s not followed through on, the tRump assisanation attempt was proof of that. Yes there will be cases where we cant foresee every potential threat, but it doesn’t make sense not to try.
Our intelligence community is supposed to have the ability to anticipate such threats, especially if they are planned in advance by a group. A lone wolf can easily defeat these efforts, but many of our worst attacks this century have had plenty of planning and advance warnings. Nobody to investigate and respond to those warnings is a failure of our various security measures. Unfortunately, if the new administration has it’s way a lot of the unseen efforts by Federal agencies will be diminished by the vengeance administration.
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