Revealed: New Orleans touted public safety street closures for years but didn’t implement them | New Orleans truck attack

Local government officials in New Orleans, which endured an intentional, deadly truck ramming attack on its most famous street during New Year’s Day celebrations, have not shut down vehicular cross traffic on that street during major events nearly 90 times – evidently failing to fully enact public safety plans that they touted ahead of the gatherings, a Guardian investigation has confirmed.

In many cases, cars and other vehicles were allowed to cross the street for the entire period that the city’s press releases said they would be forbidden from doing so. And during all but a handful of days, officials failed to place any physical barriers that would prevent motorists intending to attack crowds there from turning in either direction on to Bourbon Street, a one-way thoroughfare, leaving pedestrians vulnerable to terrorists for many years.

The findings lend an air of inevitability to the attack carried out on Bourbon Street early on 1 January by a US military veteran and sympathizer of the Islamic State terror group, who drove his rented Ford F150 Lightning pickup into revelers along three blocks of one of the globe’s most festive drags.

Shamsud-Din Jabbar not only managed to kill 14 people and injure nearly 60 more before he crashed into a parked construction vehicle and was shot to death while exchanging gunfire with police. He also exposed a years-long failure to place anti-vehicle barriers along Bourbon Street, giving terrorists a clear path down the street for much longer than most have likely realized.

Those failures persisted even as federal counter-terrorism officials in early December warned local governments about online materials suggesting an increased threat from lone attackers targeting public winter celebrations. Another chilling admonition came in the form of a 20 December vehicle ramming attack at a Christmas market in Germany that killed six people – including a nine-year-old boy – and wounded more than 200 others.

Based on thousands of public, archived and timestamped images from two Bourbon Street web cameras, the Guardian’s new analysis shows New Orleans’ public safety establishment also routinely failed to implement the next outermost line of protection: blocking the approaches to Bourbon Street from sidestreets during special events drawing dense crowds.

The city’s department of homeland security and emergency preparedness has overall responsibility for these events’ security planning. The New Orleans police department (NOPD)’s eighth district – which is headquartered a block off Bourbon Street – is supposed to execute those plans, including the street closures.

Spokespeople for both the office of the incumbent mayor, LaToya Cantrell – who has been in power since 2018 – and the police department declined to respond to emailed questions about the Guardian’s findings. The law enforcement agency cited ongoing litigation.

Though police didn’t specify, city officials are being sued by injured victims as well as families of those slain by Jabbar, who have accused the city of failing to adequately protect New Year’s revelers on the day of the attack.

It was the administration of Cantrell’s mayoral predecessor – Mitch Landrieu – that announced $40m in spending in 2017 to harden Bourbon Street from vehicular attacks such as ones that had victimized crowds in Nice and Berlin. The city’s plan called for placement of various physical barriers – including permanent, movable bollards – along the main commercial stretch of Bourbon Street as well as a protective perimeter one block out at cross streets during special events to prevent vehicles from approaching pedestrians.

But delays pertaining to construction, reports of debris clogs, the Covid-19 pandemic and a failure to provide interim replacement measures meant the central protective portion of the plan to protect Bourbon Street was never fully implemented until after the attack in January.

The closest New Orleans officials came was in early 2020, when bollards located at a minimum of four intersections were used for 15 days in a time period spanning New Year’s, the college football championship at the city’s Superdome, and the peak of the Mardi Gras season.

Activity restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of Covid in 2020 – as well as their crushing effects on tourism – stopped further bollard deployments, and they essentially never restarted, according to the Guardian’s analysis.

In place of bollards, the NOPD usually placed a single, lightweight metal crowd control barrier on the downstream side of Bourbon Street intersections. The upstream sides of the intersections were often not blocked at all.

The years-long lack of protective equipment meant to provide the backbone of the Bourbon Street security plan pushed the final line of defense against attacks outward to the cross street approaches.

In press releases ahead of a half-dozen major special events each year, the city announced mostly overnight cross street closures one block to either side of Bourbon Street, as well as along Bourbon Street itself. In many of the press releases, the city termed this a “hard” or “interior” closure.

“Soft” or “exterior” closures, which were announced at the same time, refer to the city requiring permits for vehicles used by French Quarter residents or people with business to enter from the edges of the neighborhood. Prior to 2017, soft closures were the only type implemented for special events.

After Jabbar’s attack on New Year’s Day, the NOPD claimed it placed police vehicles at perimeter intersections to act as cross street closures. It was a measure not recommended by experts.

And, in any case, surveillance video showed how Jabbar simply drove his truck around the front of a solitary police cruiser stationed at the foot of Bourbon Street to then take aim at people partying among the drag’s bars, clubs, eateries and other establishments.

The Guardian compared 32 street closure-related press releases since July 2018 with thousands of public timestamped images archived from two web cameras at the Cat’s Meow karaoke bar at the corner of Bourbon and St Peter streets. Since the press releases called for all sidestreets to be closed and opened simultaneously, St Peter Street served as an effective proxy to gauge the other sidestreets.

Private vehicles were seen crossing Bourbon Street along St Peter during the closure times on 88 of 121 days – or about 73% of the time. Nineteen other days could not be analyzed because of low-quality image data or lack of publicized closure times.

On 61 days, over half the time, private vehicles crossed Bourbon Street more than an hour after the publicized closing time, an hour before the publicized opening time, or both.

On 39 days, cars and trucks were observed crossing Bourbon Street at times so different from the scheduled times – three hours or more – as to render the press releases meaningless.

Thirty of the 39 days with at least three-hour discrepancies between their announced and actual closure hours fell during only two events over the years: Mardi Gras and French Quarter Fest, typically held in April.

In 2020, the city made a major change to its publicized Carnival security plan. The “interior” closure of Bourbon Street and its sidestreets for the last long weekend of Mardi Gras was changed from just overnight to around the clock. The around-the-clock closure announcements have been standard every year since, except when New Orleans canceled Mardi Gras in 2021 as part of its response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

But nothing changed in practice. Images from the St Peter Street cameras showed that traffic flowed along and across Bourbon Street during the daytime – through thousands of Mardi Gras revelers – just as it had until 2019. The NOPD only shut down Bourbon Street cross traffic on overnights, contradicting the Cantrell administration’s announced plans for the last four Carnival seasons held.

City ordinances allow daytime deliveries between 6am and 4pm to the many Bourbon Street bars and restaurants, accounting for a fraction of the traffic. But the cameras showed far more: private cars, non-delivery trucks and all sorts of motorized vehicles passed through the intersection along both streets – and the crowds on them – without limit prior to the eventual late afternoon closures.

Aerial images in 2024 of Lundi Gras (the second-to-last day of the Carnival season), stored on the city property tax assessor’s website confirmed the full extent of the failure to enforce the publicized plans. The overhead photos taken in mid-afternoon showed dozens of cars and trucks rolling through throngs of revelers along Bourbon Street and all eight cross streets that were supposed to be blocked off.

For the first time in many years, the city’s press release for the Carnival season culminating with Mardi Gras on Tuesday, 4 March 2025, makes no mention of specific times for street closures. It says only that there will be an interior closure of Bourbon Street, “implemented at the discretion” of the NOPD’s eighth district commander “based on pedestrian traffic flow”.

French Quarter Fest revelers also unguarded

Visitors during the extended weekend of French Quarter Fest have also unknowingly been left unguarded. The festival stages music performances across the French Quarter neighborhood surrounding Bourbon Street, including along the street itself during the daytime.

For three of the four years since 2019 that the festival has been held (it shut down due to the pandemic in 2020 and 2021), the city issued press releases claiming a “hard” closure along and around Bourbon Street during the four evenings of the April event. The 2022 city press release left out the Bourbon Street and cross street closures while calling out a roster of other standard precautions.

But there were apparently no substantial street closures along the sidestreets leading to Bourbon Street during the evenings of the French Quarter Fest in 2019, 2022, 2023 and 2024. The St Peter Street cameras showed steady flows of traffic along the sidestreets across Bourbon Street each year. Even the stationing of police vehicles and officers at the corner of St Peter and Bourbon streets – standard for most other events – was absent in 2022, 2023 and 2024.

The danger to pedestrians was clear. While most of the performances on the stages set up along Bourbon Street itself were over by 5pm, other festival performances elsewhere in the French Quarter continued well into the evening. So thousands of festivalgoers walked the streets without the protection promised by the city.

The Guardian asked Emily Madero, the president and CEO of French Quarter Festivals Inc, which produces the spring event, about the repeated failures to secure Bourbon Street’s intersections and sidestreets. She said her organization defers to the NOPD “to make all decisions regarding traffic and public safety” and had no further comment.