How Philly prepares to prevent a New Orleans-style attack

From block parties to the nation’s birthday, Philadelphia hosts numerous events that involve the type of large outdoor gatherings that make public safety officials worry about the potential for an automobile-based attack like the one that killed 14 people in New Orleans early on New Year’s Day.

Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said Philly officials have been working to prevent such an attack from happening since at least 2016, when a terrorist drove a 19-ton truck through a Bastille Day celebration in Nice, France, killing 86 people.

The New Orleans tragedy, he said, was the latest reminder that the threat remains.

“Seeing where this person was able to defeat the barrier system that they had in place, then we right away started looking at our system to see where we have to make enhancements,” Bethel said in an interview Friday. “We’re seeing on a yearly basis now where individuals are using cars as a device to cause injury, and that creates a significant, significant challenge for us in policing.”

Here’s what you need to know about Philly’s efforts to prevent a motor vehicle attack:

After the Nice attack, Philadelphia and many other cities increased their use of city vehicles, such as large sanitation trucks, to block off streets where crowds are gathering, Bethel said.

In New Orleans, the attacker drove around such a barricade and onto the sidewalk. Bethel said Philly officials are now reviewing the city’s strategies for preventing a driver from steering around barricades to pull off an attack.

For large events, the Police Department sets up a dual perimeter, with a traffic-blocking outer layer that serves as a checkpoint allowing only local or delivery vehicles into the area and an inner layer of police officers and vehicles protecting the event itself.

“We do have a two-layered process that we have, and so we now have to go through our model to see what are the enhancements,” he said. “Where can we be more intentional about potentially putting blocks on the sidewalks?”

Bethel said Philadelphia may pursue federal grants to acquire new equipment that can protect crowds, such as the movable concrete barriers that New York City deploys for large events.

“We’re looking at some of the models that New York has where they use concrete blocks on the sidewalk in addition to obstructing the street,” he said. “We’ll be going through that process now, particularly for our core events that we have, whether it be the Mummers, July Fourth, those types of events. What are the additional enhancements that we [want to] have?”

Additionally, Bethel said, he is considering encouraging city leaders to invest money in environmental changes that might not look like police equipment but could help prevent a vehicle attack like the one in New Orleans. He said it’s time to expand the concept of crime prevention through environmental design, or CPTED — a strategy to deter crime through improvements such as street lighting and cleaning — to include things like large planters that could prevent drivers from using the sidewalks if a street is blocked by police or city vehicles.

“You have to expand that model and think about: How do you put these protective barriers up as well?” he said. “What we don’t want to do is you walking around, and all you see is bollards and metal things on the sidewalks, because you still have to make a thruway for pedestrians to move. And so I think there’s other ways. Heavy, heavy planters do the exact same thing, but are much more aesthetically pleasing. Or bollards that are removable — put in during the incident and then taken out.”

Not all large gatherings are scheduled events in Center City. Every summer, for instance, Philly permits more block parties than any other city, and some attract hundreds of attendees.

The city cannot simply barricade streets for every block party, Bethel said, “because we have emergency vehicles that may need to move through.” But following the New Orleans attack, the department is reviewing its guidance and resources for block party organizers, he said.

“We can’t bollard the nation, right? We can’t bollard the city of Philadelphia, right? The reality is it’s just not possible,” he said. “We’re going to have to find a balance. So this is not a conversation around stopping block parties, but we are going to have to offer some conversations, and we have to look at our model to see what that looks like.”

Additionally, he said, the Police Department is constantly reviewing its strategies for protests, which can occur spontaneously and take unpredictable routes.

“It is virtually impossible to stop a vehicle from causing harm in a protest that is moving around and leaping through different intersections where I don’t have the capacity to put blocking vehicles,” he said. “So we have done a rolling blockade to try to minimize [the risk]. But that causes a great concern for us, so there’s a whole myriad of things that we have to think through as we consider what happened in New Orleans.”

Attacks like the one in New Orleans are in some ways more difficult to prevent due to their simplicity, Bethel said.

“A guy went and rented a car, got in the car, drove down the street, and so you just think about how simple and low-tech that is,” he said. “It’s very hard to say there’s a foolproof system that you can deploy that will ensure that no way, no shape and how, a vehicle can get into a crowd. It’s going to take a lot of awareness, a lot of conversations, to do that.”

The commissioner said he’s worried that vehicular attacks will continue in the U.S. and elsewhere.

“We’ve unfortunately seen with the school shootings, we’ve had these hopes — ‘after this one, hopefully it’ll be the last one’ — and every year we get a mass shooting at a school, right?” he said.

But he said public safety officials will work to prevent attacks and intervene effectively when they do happen so that they don’t fundamentally change how people feel about public gatherings.

“There’s a cost of freedom,” he said. “What we don’t want to do is paralyze us as a city or as a nation that we don’t live our lives in a free way.”