Ramming attacks are becoming common, and there’s only so much the police can do.
By Matthew Hennessey,
Imagine for a moment you are a New Orleans cop assigned the overnight shift on Bourbon Street on New Year’s Eve.
You know it’s going to be a long one. You’ll be breaking up fights and doing crowd control. Surely you’ll have to deal with unpleasantness from drunk people, but that’s tonight’s job. You’ll let a few things slide that you normally wouldn’t. It is New Year’s, after all, in a city known for its party culture. The French Quarter needs its tourists and their dollars. Let the good times roll.
With any luck you’ll make it to midmorning without too much trouble and you can pack it in. Call the night a success.
Then, without warning, carnage, chaos, terror. A blur. Bodies in the air. Revelers crying out, dragged under tires.
“Stop!” you shout reflexively, holding one hand in the air while placing your other hand on your weapon in anticipation of—what exactly? No time to think. It’s a stampede, a crush, a complete panic.
Then the madman behind the wheel of the murder truck leaps from the cab and starts firing—at you.
You’re trained for this. But are you really? No one is ready to take live fire. This isn’t a simulation, an exercise; these are real bullets fired with deadly intent. You hear them whizzing by, ricocheting off French Quarter walls. You never did this at the academy.
You draw your weapon and try to return fire, but the madman is moving quickly. He got the drop on all of you. You have to be careful not to shoot a civilian. You have to aim carefully.
Crack. A flash of pain, a flame in your arm, you’re hit, you’re down, you’re out of the fight. Now it’s only the shouting as the shooter disappears into the night. Now it’s only the moaning of the wounded, which includes you. It all happened so fast. How long did it take? Was it even a minute from the first scream until the bullet hit you?
“Don’t worry. We’re going to take care of you. You’re going to be all right,” someone says as he bundles you into the back of a patrol car. But he doesn’t know. Nobody ever does. It could go either way.
You know a lot of people think cops get paid overtime to sit in their cars all day and drink coffee. But not many jobs come with the real possibility of getting shot at every time you go to work. Yours does. You wish people realized how terrifying that can be. You wish that your fellow citizens understood that every time you put on your uniform, never mind your bulletproof vest, that your mind goes straight to the possibility of getting killed during your shift.
The fear is ever-present. Every highway traffic stop. Every random interaction on the street with a person asking for directions. Some guy walked up to three New York City cops on New Year’s Eve 2022 and started hacking at them with a machete. Being a cop isn’t a videogame or a movie. It’s life and death every day. You really wish people understood, but most don’t.
Your motto is “To Protect and to Serve,” and that means the public, all those who’ve come to the birthplace of jazz to ring in the New Year with an all-night party, but your goal right now is to survive.
The remarkable thing about Wednesday’s early-morning truck attack in New Orleans was its familiarity. Attacks of this sort have become common. Only a week ago an alleged Islamic terrorist slaughtered five and injured 235 by plowing through a packed Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany. In 2021 Darrell Brooks killed six and injured dozens when he rammed a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wis. On the afternoon of Halloween in 2017, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov drove his rented pickup truck for a mile down the sidewalk along Manhattan’s West Side Highway, killing eight.
Those are only the easy ones to remember. There are many others, the worst was in Nice, France, in 2016, where 86 people lost their lives. How quickly we file it all away.
You know the police can do only so much. Cities like New Orleans and New York can harden their sidewalks and public squares against attack with barricades and surveillance, but these killers are nothing if not resourceful. They always come up with some new method of spilling the blood of innocents and spreading fear. In the infamous formulation, the terrorist only has to be lucky once. The bastards.
Someone tells you that 10 people died on Wednesday morning. That’s 10 families wrecked, scarred forever by the actions of a complete lunatic whose motivations are currently unknown but don’t matter anyway. Not to those families. More could die, including you and your colleague, the other New Orleans police officer who didn’t go home to his family this morning.
You remember that it’s New Year’s Day. Half the world is waking up with a hangover. You know that some people will hear the terrible news from your beloved city and reflect on the senseless loss of life. You wonder if they’ll think of you. You wonder if they’ll say a prayer for all who protect and serve.
Mr. Hennessey is the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor.
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