Proposed Security Solutions for Public Spaces
In the aftermath of the New Year’s Eve attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, ECE Distinguished Professor Carey Rappaport highlights the need for improved security measures in public spaces that include physical barriers and innovative architectural solutions.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cody Mello-Klein. Main photo: Security for vulnerable, public “soft targets” might need to go beyond physical barriers like bollards and police cars, a Northeastern security expert says. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
New Orleans New Year’s Eve terror attack shows the challenges of protecting ‘soft targets,’ expert says
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.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News