Why stopping vehicular attacks is a big challenge : NPR

Intentional vehicular assaults on crowds of individuals, just like the one which killed 14 revelers in New Orleans on New Yr’s Day, are usually not new. They’ve been carried out for decades. Though in recent times, they’ve more and more been utilized by terrorist teams and people.

“Terrorism has modified,” mentioned Devorah Margolin, senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Close to East Coverage. Aircraft hijackings, such because the Sept. 11 assaults, have change into much less frequent, she mentioned, whereas “these low- to medium-impact or low- to medium-cost [vehicle-based] assaults are sort of extra popularized.”

The FBI mentioned the person who deliberately drove a pickup truck into crowds on Bourbon Avenue early on New Yr’s Day acted alone and that the assault is being investigated as an act of terrorism. Whereas a particular motive remains to be unclear, the FBI mentioned the suspect was impressed by ISIS.

Margolin mentioned such vehicle-based assaults require much less communication between a central group and people, and subsequently much less threat. They’re additionally inexpensive.

“All you require is a automobile so as to carry this out,” she mentioned.

In an unclassified doc from 2010, Department of Homeland Security officials warned that vehicle-ramming permits terrorists who lack entry to or experience in explosives or different weapons a chance to hold out an assault.

Whereas safety measures at airports and different public venues have been bolstered following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist assaults, The Washington Institute’s Margolin mentioned that “vehicular assaults are fairly laborious to cease.”

“Smooth targets, akin to areas during which civilians are having fun with themselves stress-free, are clearly simpler targets as a result of you may simply drive proper via,” she mentioned.

A short historical past of vehicular assaults

Islamic terrorist teams have been calling for these kinds of assaults for over a decade. However in 2016, ISIS began aggressively promoting vehicle attacks — notably within the U.S. and Europe — via its on-line journal Rumiyah, together with directions its supporters had been inspired to make use of to hold out such assaults.

In 2017, an Islamic extremist drove a rented pickup truck into a well-liked Manhattan bike path, killing eight folks. The New York Police Division’s deputy commissioner of intelligence said at the time that the perpetrator adopted the ISIS pointers “nearly precisely to a T.”

The yr prior, a pupil at Ohio State College in Columbus injured more than a dozen people when he carried out a automobile and knife assault on campus.

Most of those assaults have taken place in Europe, the place automobiles present an alternative choice to firearms, that are more difficult to access relative to the U.S.

The deadliest vehicular assault in latest historical past was in Nice, France, in July 2016, which killed greater than 80 folks. ISIS claimed duty for the rampage.

Nonetheless, most of the assailants behind a wave of such assaults that occurred within the area in 2016 and 2017 had no identified ties to ISIS. Even the place authorities have discovered no proof that ISIS directed an assault, the terrorist group has usually claimed duty in an obvious effort to get publicity.

In 2016, a truck mowed via a Christmas market in Berlin, leaving no less than 12 lifeless and lots of extra injured, in one more incident during which the Islamic State took credit score.

Related assaults had been additionally carried out round that point in Barcelona, Stockholm and London.

However the usage of automobiles as weapons goes again even additional.

In Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, a driver plowed into a crowd of individuals protesting a white supremacist rally. One particular person was killed and greater than 30 others had been injured.

And in 2008, no less than three totally different Palestinian attackers used vehicles and bulldozers to kill folks in and close to Jerusalem.

That very same yr, 16 folks had been killed after a Uyghur attacked dozens of Chinese language law enforcement officials with a dump truck and machetes.

What main cities have performed to attempt to stop vehicular assaults

Regardless of the motive, such assaults have confirmed tough to stop. Main U.S. cities have tried. 

After the Islamic State urged its supporters to assault the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2016, New York police deployed sand-filled sanitation trucks, bomb-sniffing canines and different defenses alongside streets bordering the parade route.

Then, following the 2017 bike path assault, New York Metropolis introduced a plan to install 1,500 bollards in a number of the metropolis’s most populated areas as a approach to block automobiles.

On the time of this week’s assault in New Orleans, bollards on Bourbon Avenue had been within the technique of being repaired in preparation for internet hosting the Tremendous Bowl subsequent month.

However police indicated that even functioning barricades would not have stopped the assault, because the perpetrator drove up onto the sidewalk to bypass these safeguards.

“We did have a automobile there, we had boundaries there, we had officers there, they usually nonetheless bought round,” New Orleans Police Division Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick mentioned Wednesday. “We did certainly have a plan, however the terrorist defeated it.”

The New Orleans incident has prompted each public security officers and personal firms to return to the drafting board, mentioned Brian Stephens, a senior managing director with consultancy agency Teneo’s safety threat advisory apply. He works with private and non-private companies to provide you with methods to mitigate these kinds of safety threats.

“Plenty of instances, the place these bollards or boundaries are type of put in place after which forgotten about and by no means checked out once more,” he mentioned, “I’m listening to from a whole lot of purchasers and a whole lot of companions that they’ve the necessity to revisit what they’ve performed previously.”

Greg Shill, a legislation professor who research transportation coverage on the College of Iowa, says that lowering automobile dependency in dense cities, together with the usage of massive automobiles in city facilities, may assist.  

“However I am not conscious of any U.S. cities which can be critically measures to maintain massive automobiles out of the city core,” he mentioned. “Even modest measures are inclined to encounter fairly fierce opposition to pedestrianize a avenue for, , youngsters at an adjoining college to play for an hour or two.”

Nonetheless, he acknowledges that car rammings are a posh risk for any metropolis with no cut-and-dried resolution.

“I do not suppose there is a silver bullet right here,” he mentioned.

NPR’s Greg Myre contributed reporting.