Authorities in New Orleans committed several errors that made it easy for an unhinged madman to plow into New Year’s revelers early Wednesday — and may have gotten too “lackadaisical” after having handled large crowd sizes in the past, a security expert told The Post.
Taken together, the missteps and oversights likely gave homegrown terrorist Shamsud Din Jabbar just enough leeway to execute his wicked plan — which has left 14 dead and dozens more injured after the massacre on Bourbon Street.
Ironically, the New Orleans Police Department might have been a victim of its past success, according to Clint Emerson, a retired Navy SEAL and owner of security company Escape the Wolf.
“There are so many events that happen outside of Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street [and] they’ve just been using the same old tactics — which have worked,” Emerson told The Post on Thursday.
“It’s like, ‘Well, we haven’t had an issue, so what do we need to improve?” he said. “I think they just got lackadaisical.”
Much has been made about the city’s now-controversial decision to remove bollards and other devices installed on Bourbon Street in 2017 to prevent this type of vehicle-borne attack — but Emerson says there were other, bigger blunders in law enforcement’s protection plan.
In fact, the 42-year-old Jabbar should have never been able to get that close to his target in the first place.
“They needed to push the perimeter much further out,” Emerson explained. “You want at least one or two blocks in every direction — that’s where your perimeter should start.”
Creating that big “air gap” would let authorities put uniformed cops, parked police cruisers and other barriers between the perimeter and the terrorist’s intended target — which was, in this case, the tourist-packed party avenue.
But the cops didn’t do that.
Instead, they parked a police cruiser at the intersection of Canal and Bourbon streets, which Jabbar simply drove around on his nightmare crusade.
That’s part of the reason Emerson — who frequently traveled to New Orleans and used the city’s grid to teach foot surveillance to other SEALs — isn’t sure the bollards would have stopped Jabbar either way.
“That’s the question — because he took advantage of the gap on the sidewalk,” Emerson said. “If [the bollards] don’t extend to the sidewalk itself, well then it wouldn’t have stopped him because he jumped the curb, ran over a bunch of people and took that hard right onto Bourbon Street.”
“People are making a big deal about the vehicle [bollards], but if you look at what this guy did … he could have done that even if they had the right technology in place.”
On Wednesday, the New Orleans police said the portable steel bollards — erected eight years ago as part of a $40 million public safety plan — don’t extend to the sidewalks, according to NOLA.com.
The city yanked them out in November as part of a three-month security overhaul meant to rectify what French Quarter Management District head Bob Simms dubbed an “ineffective” system.
“The track was always full of crap, beads and doubloons and God knows what else. Not the best idea,” Simms told Nola.com.
“Eventually, everybody realized the need to replace them. They’re in the process of doing that, but the new ones are not yet operational.”
At least 14 people died and about 35 were injured when the Army-vet-turned-terrorist’s F-150 Lightning EV truck careened down Bourbon Street just after 3 a.m., stopping only after it slammed into a crane blocking the way.
Cops swarmed the truck and killed the suspected madman in a gun battle.
More than 300 cops and 60 Louisiana State Troopers were downtown ahead of the New Year’s celebration, which coincided with a Sugar Bowl game originally scheduled for New Year’s Day before being postponed to Thursday.
“We had patrol cars out there as a hard target,” Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said at a press conference according to NOLA.com.
“This particular terrorist drove around onto the sidewalk and got around the hard target.”
Gov. Jeff Landry admitted the security gap needed to be closed.
“We recognize we have a problem, and we are going to fix it,” said Landry. “We can go on what-ifs forever. This is evil. That guy could have easily gone down the sidewalk of Canal Street.”
But that’s why Emerson said the perimeter should have been further away — and the cops should have littered the area with immovable barriers to stymie would-be foes.
“Ensuring that they had heavy vehicles in there — definitely at the outer perimeter — would have done a better job,” he said. “It’s your typical dump truck full of sand like they do in New York, and ensuring the sidewalks also have some kind of barricades.”
But the retired SEAL said securing such public, fluid areas is tough, no matter who’s trying to do it.
“It’s a 360-degree environment, and it’s very difficult to prevent everything,” he said. “The bottom line is, unfortunately, when you talk about these lone-wolf, martyr-type deals where he knows he’s gonna’ die in the end — it’s difficult to stop that.”
“He knew he wasn’t going to survive, he was all in,” he said. “And it’s tough to defeat. Because how many guys are like, ‘Oh, I’m all in on dying for the shield on my chest as a police officer!’
“Like, are you really?”
