New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick, seated at right, listens to public comments during a City Council hearing Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025, on the New Year’s terrorist attack on Bourbon Street. (Greg LaRose/Louisiana Illuminator)
NEW ORLEANS – In the wake of a deadly New Year’s terrorist attack, New Orleans’ police chief refused to answer questions about the city’s security measures during a city council hearing Wednesday, citing an ongoing state investigation.
The hearing came amid increased scrutiny over whether the city officials could have done more to block access to Bourbon Street, where Shamsud-Din Jabbar killed 14 people and injured 37 more before police fatally shot him.
“There will be a time and a place for reflection on our actions,” NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said. “That is not today.”
Kirkpatrick also said she would not resign, acknowledging some critics in the community who have called on her to step down.
What few questions the chief did field led to some testy exchanges with council members, who said they were interested in what measures were being taken ahead of the upcoming Super Bowl and Mardi Gras.
Rick Hathaway, the city’s public works director, confirmed to the council that his department maintains the traffic bollards that had been removed from Bourbon Street and, in theory, would have prevented Jabbar’s attack.
As to where bollards and other security barriers should be placed, Hathaway and Kirkpatrick said that falls to the city’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
Its director, Collin Arnold, and city Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montaño were not at Wednesday’s council hearing. Arnold told WVUE-TV Fox 8 later Wednesday he wasn’t invited to the meeting. He said the NOPD, and not his office, is responsible for deploying barriers.
A spokeswoman for Mayor LaToya Cantrell told the Illuminator that Arnold and Montaño were not on the agenda for the council hearing but did not respond when asked if they were invited or had conflicts that prevented them from attending.
City Councilman Oliver Thomas, who convened Wednesday’s hearing, said his staff reached out to invite Arnold and Montaño to Wednesday’s hearing. He voiced frustration that Kirkpatrick could not provide a current inventory of security barriers.
“It seemed to me that, other than listening, the chief came before us not wanting to answer any questions,” Thomas said in an interview after the hearing.
Councilman at large JP Morrell will launch a separate investigation Thursday into the city’s security infrastructure and assets. It will include several years of contracts that detail how much was invested in the equipment, he said.
“It’s the time and money, too. The lost time can’t be understated,” Morrell said in an interview. “In that window, we should have been able to accomplish something better and really understand what went wrong, so that we can fix it currently [and] permanently fix it to not have that problem in the future.”
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Barrier inventory unknown
Since late 2017, New Orleans has relied on three types of hardened barriers to keep vehicles out of the heart of the French Quarter.
- Steel posts or bollards have been placed at eight intersections along Bourbon Street between Iberville and St. Ann streets.
- Portable hydraulic gates for select side streets that intersect with Bourbon. They can be operated with an onboard electric motor or by hand when power is not available.
- Portable but smaller Archer 1200 barriers. The 700-pound, crescent-shaped pieces of steel that can be placed together to close off a street or on the sidewalk to cover gaps next to the hydraulic gates or bollards.
All three experienced failures in the lead up to and during the attack, not as a result of design or operational defects Jabbar exploited but from decisions the city made in the months and years prior.
One of the hydraulic barriers sits at the start of Bourbon Street, just feet from a sidewalk memorial that’s taken shape since the attack. It’s one of three the city purchased in 2017 manufactured by Delta Scientific, a Palmdale, California, company, at a cost of $43,000 each.
For the New Year’s holiday celebrations, it was placed behind an NOPD patrol vehicle parked at the Canal Street intersection. The barrier should have been raised and — if paired with Archers on the sidewalks – would have likely stopped Jabbar before he had any chance to hurt anyone. When deployed properly, the Delta MP5000, the model New Orleans owns, is crash-test rated to stop a 7.5-ton truck traveling up to 40 mph, according to manufacturer’s specifications.
At a Jan. 1 news conference, NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick noted emphatically that Jabbar had driven his truck up on the sidewalk, claiming he “got around the hard target, where we had a car there, we had barriers there.”
Surveillance video from the outside of the Krystal restaurant at 116 Bourbon St., 150 feet from Canal Street, shows that while Jabbar did indeed squeeze around a NOPD vehicle by steering onto the sidewalk, he then drove directly over the lowered MP5000 gate.
“We knew that [gate] had malfunction problems,” the police chief said. “And I want you to understand, let’s say we put the wedge up and it got stuck. There is no way that an ambulance could get in or out. People couldn’t get in and out. So we knew that these were malfunctioning.”
The Illuminator reached Delta Scientific a day after the attack. Keith Bobosky, president of Delta Scientific, said in a statement he “has reached out to the city to investigate the condition and operability of the vehicle barriers on site in New Orleans,” and said local officials have never contacted his company about any problems with the unit.
In response to subsequent questions from the Illuminator, Brobosky said the gate can be raised and lowered even when it’s malfunctioning.
Delta’s base model barriers can run on rechargeable batteries, household power, solar cells or a generator, Brobosky said. Should they run out of power or experience a mechanical failure while raised, the gate can be lowered manually using gravity. It can also be raised using a hand pump, which Brobosky said is standard with the MP5000.
The day after the attack, the MP5000 on Bourbon near Canal was raised, and two Archer barriers were placed on the sidewalks on each side of the hydraulic gate.
Six other Delta barriers were placed on one-way streets that cross an eight-block portion of 13-block Bourbon Street. Each was placed on the “upstream” side of the one-way street, in an apparent assumption that the most likely direction of vehicle attack would be with traffic rather than against it. The two streets in the eight-block section without Delta barriers – Iberville and Orleans – are under construction and impassable just off Rampart Street but remain open for blocks before Bourbon.
Whereabouts of most Archers uncertain
In February 2017, the city purchased 45 portable Archer barriers at $5,500 each, city records show. They are manufactured by Meridian Rapid Defense Group of Pasadena, California, and are certified to stop vehicles traveling 30 mph in a matter of feet, depending upon how they are deployed. Even with a vehicle traveling at a higher speed, Archers would still be effective.
But none were deployed in time for New Year’s Eve, and city leaders didn’t mention the devices at the Jan. 1 news conference.
The next day, as federal authorities held a news conference, NOPD personnel moved Archers to at least four locations in the French Quarter. A couple of hours later, just as Bourbon Street was cleared as a crime scene, a reporter asked Kirkpatrick where the Archers had come from.
“Actually, we have them. I didn’t know about them, but we have ’em,” she said. “And so we have been able now to put them out.”
While Kirkpatrick might have been unaware of their existence, the NOPD has deployed Archers many times on Bourbon cross streets since 2017. Google Street View searches and Orleans Parish Assessor’s website photos often show the devices, as recently as 2023, in groups of two or three at the ends of streets. Based on the dated photos, the Archers are either awaiting deployment or pick-up before or after a major French Quarter event.
As recently as Saturday, the NOPD had six Archers outside its 8th District headquarters in the French Quarter, along with two dollies used to move them.
At a city storage yard in Mid-City, six more Archers could be seen Saturday from the Lafitte Greenway, buried behind construction site barricades and overgrown with weeds. They had been moved from the lot as of Tuesday morning, but a seventh Archer remained under several NOPD barricades and weedy overgrowth.
The Illuminator was able to locate about 20 Archers. The location of more than 20 others remains unknown, with the city and NOPD not answering questions about their whereabouts.
State entity has known about bollard issues since 2019
New Orleans installed its first bollards along Bourbon Street in December 2017 as part of what would be a problem-plagued construction project. Over budget and behind schedule for a variety of reasons, the work had to be split into two phases and took two years to finish.
The bollards appear to be some of the sturdiest models on the market, with the England-based manufacturer Heald claiming they can withstand impact from a 7.5-ton truck at 40 mph and only move 4 inches. They can also be removed to allow delivery trucks, taxis and other traffic on Bourbon Street during the day.
The Illuminator could not obtain the contracts reflecting what the city paid for the bollards.
City officials claim debris, such as Mardi Gras beads and trash, clogs the bollard tracks, leading some posts to be removed for good. The remaining systems are being extracted from the street to be replaced with a different make and model, which The Times-Picayune has reported aren’t strong enough to have stopped Jabbar’s truck.
More than a dozen Heald bollard systems sit outside a city storage building on Lafayette Street near the Superdome. It’s not clear how long they have been there.
The new bollards are part of the city’s ongoing infrastructure improvement program planned ahead of Super Bowl LIX, taking place Feb. 9 at the Superdome. But officials have known about problems with the Heald equipment for at least five years.
The security firm Interfor International wrote a confidential report in November 2019 for the French Quarter Management District, a state political subdivision that oversees street and sidewalk upkeep, among other matters, in the historic neighborhood.
The bollard equipment “does not appear to work,” the company wrote, recommending that “bollard mobilization be fixed/improved immediately.” The findings didn’t go public until the New York Times reported on them last week after the attack.
“The challenge with the French Quarter is that every decision is done by committee,” Councilman Joe Giarrusso said at Wednesday’s hearing. “There are five different groups that have to be consulted before something can be done.”
Only in 2024 did efforts to finally do something with the Heald bollards finally move forward. The $1.5 million multimillion-dollar project was designed by the local office of engineering firm Mott MacDonald and installed by Hard Rock Construction – the same two companies involved in the Bourbon Street project that took two years to complete.
