Columbus police are monitoring the investigation into the suspected terrorist attack in New Orleans that killed over a dozen people on New Year's Day morning.
Columbus police monitor large events in Ohio's largest city multiple times a year and assess and monitor the events for possible security threats. Columbus Division of Police Deputy Chief Robert Sagle said the department adjusts their tactics and learn from what we see from tragic attacks like the one in New Orleans to make sure CPD is prepared should tragedy strike.
"Threat actors are constantly evolving their tactics to exploit vulnerabilities. So we're constantly adjusting our tactics and learning from what we see at different things so that we can be better prepared. So it's just constantly learning and training," Sagle said.
A U.S. Army veteran named Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a pickup truck into a crowd of New Year’s Day revelers, killing 14. Jabbar died from gunshot wounds after a shootout with police.
“This is not just an act of terrorism. This is evil,” New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick told the Associated Press.
The driver “defeated” safety measures in place to protect pedestrians, Kirkpatrick said, and was “hell-bent on creating the carnage and the damage that he did.”
Like the New Year's celebration in that city, thousands of people attend events like Stonewall Columbus Pride, Red White and Boom, the Columbus Marathon and the Arnold Classic every year.
Sagle said people may see larger police presence, police cruisers and barriers blocking the road and other measures to prevent similar tragedies.
"So there's hundreds of thousands of people in and around downtown and the Short North. And we can't just use personnel to solve that problem. We have to leverage technology," Sagle said. "Cameras utilizing our new real time crime center drones, drone detection technology, movable barriers...partners that have large trucks, things like that."
Sagle said they don't discuss how many officers they deploy and where.
"It's a large police presence. Our entire goal is that...anywhere that people are, we want them to be able to look in a direction and be able to see a police officer," he said.
Sagle said after terrorist attacks like New Orleans or others around the nation over the years, Columbus police have a goal to "harden as much as we can" to make it more difficult for a threat actor to be able to do something damaging.
"As we see these things happen all around the country and all around the world, we just have to anticipate that that could happen here and we respond accordingly," Sagle said.
