New Orleans officials were warned in 2019 that Bourbon Street was vulnerable to car-ramming attack
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
(NEW ORLEANS, La) — New Orleans city leaders were warned in a 2019 confidential physical security assessment that tourist-packed Bourbon Street was vulnerable to a vehicle-ramming attack because some of the existing blockade mechanisms were inoperable.
New Orleans first installed metal security barriers on Bourbon Street in 2017 following the 2016 truck terror attack on Bastille Day in Nice, France. That same year, a report prepared by the infrastructure consulting firm AECOM noted that Bourbon Street “is often densely packed with pedestrians,” presenting “a risk and target for terrorism.”
Two years later, a security assessment prepared for the French Quarter Management District by the security firm Interfor International faulted the bollards that had been installed.
“Some of the bollards were inoperable for a number of reasons,” Don Aviv, president of Interfor International, said. “Some were broken and some were kept down for ease of use.”
The existence of the 2019 assessment was first reported by The New York Times.
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city had been in the process of renovating the malfunctioning bollards before hosting the Super Bowl in February.
“Bollards were not up because they are near completion, with the expectation of being completed by Super Bowl,” Cantrell said. “Because the City of New Orleans is hosting Super Bowl this year, it gave the City of New Orleans an opportunity to go further and deeper with infrastructure improvements.”
New Orleans police parked a cruiser to block Bourbon Street on New Year’s Eve.
“We did indeed have a plan, but the terrorist defeated it,” New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said.
Video of the attack shows the suspect’s truck moving along Canal Street and making a right turn, moving around the police cruiser by driving onto the sidewalk. Aviv suggested it should not be so simple.
“For the type of environment the French Quarter is, there should be a systemic process to control traffic and to protect pedestrians,” Aviv said.
The French Quarter Management District told ABC News in a statement that it’s always focused on public safety.
“In 2019, the Board commissioned a study on Safety and Security in the French Quarter. This study was shared with our partners in the City of New Orleans, and its recommendations were made public,” the statement said. “The strength of our ongoing partnership with the City and NOPD allows open communications of resident and business concerns and the results of any studies or reports completed.”
ABC News’ Jared Kofsky contributed to this report.
(EL SEGUNDO, Calif.) — Mattel has apologized after boxes for some of its new dolls from the movie “Wicked” included a link to a pornographic website.
The packages for the dolls were printed with a web address to an adult film site with the same name as the upcoming movie musical starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo.
Customers who noticed the mistake shared images of the toy boxes on social media.
Mattel has apologized for the boxes, describing the link as a “misprint.”
“Mattel was made aware of a misprint on the packaging of the Mattel Wicked collection dolls, primarily sold in the U.S., which intended to direct consumers to the official WickedMovie.com landing page. We deeply regret this unfortunate error and are taking immediate action to remedy this,” the toy company said in a statement.
“Parents are advised that the misprinted, incorrect website is not appropriate for children. Consumers who already have the product are advised to discard the product packaging or obscure the link and may contact Mattel Customer Service for further information,” the company added.
Police investigate a mass shooting that erupted on June 2, 2024, that left one man dead and 28 people injured at a large street party in Akron, Ohio. (ABC News/WEWS)
(NEW YORK) — Homicides across the United States are poised to plummet for the third straight year as 2024 winds down, driving the nation’s annual murder toll down to levels not seen since before the pandemic, according to preliminary data from cities both large and small.
Based on available crime statistics from U.S. law enforcement agencies, the year is expected to end with a nearly 16% drop in homicides nationwide and a 3.3% decline in overall violent crime, Jeff Asher, a national crime analyst, told ABC News.
The dramatic drop in homicides surpasses a 13% decline in 2023, then the largest decrease on record until now. In 2022, the number of murders across the country fell 6%, according to the FBI.
The three consecutive years of declining homicides come in the wake of 30% jump in murders between 2019 and 2020, the largest single-year increase in more than a century.
“Considering where we were just three or four years ago, we’re basically looking at 5,000 fewer murder victims than in 2020, 2021 and 2022 having occurred in 2024,” said Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a former crime analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department.
In contrast, a dozen major U.S. cities broke annual homicide records in 2021.
Philadelphia — which recorded an all-time high of 562 homicides in 2021, 516 in 2022 and 410 last year — has seen a 40% drop in homicides in 2024.
Other major cities seeing precipitous reductions in homicides this year are New Orleans, down 38%; Washington, D.C., down 29%; Memphis, Tennessee, down 23%; Baltimore, down 24%; Kansas City, Missouri, down 20%; and Los Angeles, down 15%.
New York City, the nation’s largest city, had recorded 357 homicides through Dec. 15, a 7.3% drop from 2023, according to New York Police Department crime statistics. The city — which tallied 442 murders in 2020, a 45% jump from 2019 — has seen homicides fall 15% over the past two years.
Chicago has recorded a 7% decline in homicides as of Dec. 15, down from 603 murders at this time last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s crime data. Over the past three years, homicides in Chicago have fallen 29% after skyrocketing 55% between 2019 and 2020 to 769 murders.
Homicides this year in 63 cities with populations of more than 250,000 declined by at least 15% and murders were down at least 19% in 246 cities with populations under 250,000, Asher’s research found.
“It’s a tremendous achievement in terms of how far murder has fallen in just really two straight years,” Asher said.
Property crime plummets
In addition to violent crime falling, property crime is also poised to finish the year down 8.6% nationwide, mostly due to a 21.4% decrease in motor vehicle theft, Asher said.
“Auto thefts went up 12% last year. They’re coming down more than 20% this year,” said Asher, who added that the 2023 spike in car thefts appears to be tied to social media instruction videos on how to steal certain models of Kias and Hyundais.
Crunching the numbers
Since 2016, Asher has crunched the numbers for an end-of-the-year report on crime trends. This year, his report is based on preliminary crime statistics from 309 U.S. law enforcement agencies, the most data he has ever received.
Asher’s analysis aligns closely with data released in May by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing murders down 14%. The Gun Violence Archive, a website that tracks all shootings across the nation, shows homicides are down around 11%.
“We kind of put all those together and we see a very large decline in murder, a very large decline in gun violence happening in the U.S. in 2024 on top of what was a very large decline in murder and a very large decline in gun violence in 2023,” Asher said.
Referring to overall violent crime, Asher said, “You’re probably looking at, if not the lowest violent crime rate since 1970, certainly at or around where we were pre-pandemic.”
Besides homicide, rape was down 4.5% from 2023, robberies fell 1.1% and aggravated assaults declined 3.7%, according to Asher.
The falling numbers come amid a backdrop of high-profile violent crimes in 2024, including more than 400 mass shootings, two assassination attempts on President-elect Donald Trump and the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson allegedly by 26-year-old Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione, who police suspect was out to strike fear in the insurance industry.
The numbers also come just days after a 15-year-old girl allegedly carried out a shooting rampage at her Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, killing a teacher and a classmate, and injured six other students before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.
The Wisconsin shooting came three months after a 14-year-old boy allegedly killed two students and two teachers, and injured nine others at his high school in Winder, Georgia, with an AR-style weapon police alleged his father gave him as a Chrismas present.
‘We have turned the tide against violent crime’
During a Dec. 10 briefing of the Justice Department’s Violence Crime Reduction Steering Committee meeting, Attorney General Merrick Garland said preliminary crime data showed significant declines in violent crime in 85 cities in 2024, including a 17.5% drop in homicides nationwide.
“Over the past two years, we have turned the tide against the violent crime that spiked during the pandemic,” Garland said.
He said the numbers build on the historic drop in homicides nationwide last year, which he said was the lowest level of violent crime in 50 years.
Merrick attributed the tumbling violent crime rate partly to the DOJ’s Violent Crime Reduction Roadmap, a one-stop-shop created to assist local jurisdictions in developing, implementing and evaluating the strategies to prevent, intervene and respond to acts of community gun violence.
President Joe Biden’s administration has also sought to curb gun violence in recent years through executive actions and signing into law in 2022 the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which enhanced background checks for gun buyers under the age of 21, allocated $750 million to help states implement “red flag laws” to remove firearms from people deemed dangerous to themselves and others.
Biden also established the in 2023 the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention to focus on ways to assist states and cities reduce the nation’s epidemic of gun violence.
Some cities such as Philadelphia have credited the work of violence interrupter programs, community-based initiatives that use peacebuilding methods to head off incidents of violence before they occur.
In Philadelphia, city leaders also pointed to a $184 million investment in gun violence initiatives in 2022, including one that attempts to identify people who are at risk of being involved in violence to provide them with mental health services or job placement. While the city also boosted the Philadelphia Police Department’s budget that year by $30 million, it instituted a violence prevention plan that emphasizes a combination of law enforcement strategies, environmental improvements and youth programs to reduce its homicide numbers.
“We need to continue pressing forward with our comprehensive approach, which is prevention, intervention and enforcement,” Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker said at a Nov. 1 news conference on the city’s falling homicide numbers.
In October, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed six bills to strengthen New York’s gun laws, including one requiring gun sellers to post tobacco-style safety warnings and another that cracks down on illegal devices called “switches” that convert semiautomatic handguns into automatic weapons.
Asher said that in 2020 and 2021 when violent crime rose to alarming levels, programs such as community violence interruptors didn’t exist and the budgets of many police departments were getting slashed in the defund-the-police movement stemming from nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Asher said states and local governments, as well as philanthropies, are pumping money into programs to bring down violent crime.
“Some of that is undoubtedly contributing to what we’re seeing now,” Asher said. “I’m not naïve enough to suggest that that’s the entire explanation. There are undoubtedly a multitude of factors that help to explain this complex problem.”
ABC News’ Calvin Milliner contributed to this report.
One person was killed and two were injured by falling trees in Washington state as a powerful storm moved into the Pacific Northwest.
In Lynwood, a woman in her 50s was killed when a tree fell on a homeless encampment Tuesday night. In Puget Sound, two were transported to hospitals when a tree fell on a trailer, officials said.
The storm exploded into a bomb cyclone off the coast, near Vancouver Island, Canada, where winds gusted near 101 mph.
A bomb cyclone means the pressure in the center of the storm drops 24 millibars within 24 hours.
Wind gusts reached 50 to 84 mph from Northern California to Washington.
As the storm sits and spins over the ocean this week, it will help to push a plume of Pacific moisture called an atmospheric river into Oregon and Northern California.
Alerts are in effect through Friday for flooding, snow, avalanches and high winds.
Some places could see more than 1 foot of rain this week. A flood watch has been issued in Northern California.
