It’s the New Year’s holiday and this weekend Americans are attending parties, public celebrations, football games and other events.
And while security has always necessarily been tight at these types of events, revelers will notice more security than ever this year.
Specifically, they will notice measures designed to prevent attackers from driving their vehicles into crowds of people in an effort to kill as many pedestrians as possible.
In Manhattan, home of the iconic New Year’s Eve celebration, police surrounded Times Square with massive 20-ton sanitation trucks weighted with an extra 15 tons of sand. The 65 trucks, along with 100 patrol cars at intersections surrounding the Times Square festivities, offered a layer of protection not seen in years past.
New York Police Department officials told ABC News its preparations were influenced by the deadly truck-driving attacks in crowded areas of Berlin, Germany and Nice, France, this year. It was less than two weeks ago that a Tunisian Muslim plowed a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring 56 more. In July, another Tunisian-born Muslim drove a cargo truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day on the promenade in Nice, killing 86 people and injuring 434.
“We live in a changing world now,” NYPD Commissioner James O’Neil told ABC. “It can’t just be, ‘What happens in New York, what happens in the United States?’ It has to be more, ‘What happens worldwide?'”
New York City is far from the only American municipality crafting security plans for the future based on terrorist attacks elsewhere in the world. Among the added precautions in Las Vegas this year was the closure of the Las Vegas Strip to vehicles from about 6 p.m. on New Year’s Eve to a few hours after midnight on New Year’s Day.
As in New York, Vegas authorities cited the Berlin Christmas market truck attack as the reason behind their efforts to keep vehicles out of pedestrian areas. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sgt. Jeff Clark did not divulge his agency’s exact plans for preventing car attacks, according to Fox News, but said barriers would be “enhanced” compared with last year.
Leo Hohmann, a veteran journalist and WND news editor, expects these types of security measures to continue in America long after this holiday weekend.
“I do believe it will become the new ‘normal’ to see police on the streets holding assault rifles and using massive road blocks to prevent vehicles from being used as weapons,” said Hohmann, author of the brand new book “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and the Resettlement Jihad.” “Now that we’ve seen cars and trucks used to attack innocent civilians by Islamic terrorists in Nice, France, in Berlin, Germany, and at Ohio State University, that adds a whole new dynamic to what our law enforcement must be prepared to protect us against.”
Pamela Geller, president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative and author of “Stop the Islamization of America,” agreed heightened security is here to stay, thanks largely to President Obama’s policies.
“It is the new normal,” Geller told WND. “It doesn’t have to be, but Obama’s suicidal policies regarding Muslim immigration make it necessary. This doesn’t have to be the case, but there are an unknowable number of jihadis among the Muslim migrants he has brought in.
“New Year’s Eve, once a huge party celebrating life and the coming New Year, is now fraught with terror and peril.”
Philip Haney, a retired Customs and Border Protection officer and founding member of the Department of Homeland Security, concurred that increased security will become the new standard at large-scale events in America. He pointed out Muslim terrorists have carried out more than 30,000 deadly attacks around the world since 9/11, constituting a trend with which law enforcement officials everywhere must cope.
“The intensity of the attacks is increasing and the lethality of them is also increasing,” Haney told WND. “We’re not immune from that growing trend. So sadly, I think this is the new normal – until we begin to take more effective steps to identify the nature of the threat.”
Haney, author of the revealing memoir “See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad,” added that taking extra precautions should be the new normal, but law enforcement should not limit themselves to defensive reactions brought about by attacks elsewhere in the world. In his view, adequate precautions must include enforcing immigration laws and allowing counter-terrorism and law enforcement officials to do their job.
“That’s your first line of defense,” Haney said. “When DHS was first formed, that was what we were called: the first line of defense for America’s border. So let’s take those words at face value and allow DHS to do the job they were created to do. We should be a lot more preemptive than we have been.”
Hohmann agreed the best way to protect Americans is to reevaluate the immigration system, making note of the trend in recent terror attacks.
“In all of these cases – Nice, Berlin, Ohio State and all of the other recent terrorist events – the perpetrator has been a Muslim migrant or son of a Muslim migrant,” Hohmann said. “That goes for the attacks in Orlando against a gay nightclub, the attack in San Bernardino against an office Christmas party, the attack on Chattanooga that killed five U.S. servicemen, the attack on a St. Cloud, Minnesota, mall. All of these attacks were done by Muslim migrants or their sons, families brought here at the invitation of our government.
“How many more people need to die or be seriously injured before we hold our government accountable?”
Although there were no known terrorist threats to this year’s Rose Bowl game or the accompanying Rose Parade, police in Pasadena, California were not taking any chances. The Pasadena Police Department planned to lock down 56 streets near the Rose Parade route with water barricades, police cruisers and armed officers. The goal, as in New York and Las Vegas, is to prevent a truck attack like the ones in Berlin and Nice.
Police had promised earlier this month to have more security for this year’s Rose Parade and Rose Bowl game, both scheduled for Jan. 2, than last year. Their plans include more than 1,500 uniformed and undercover officers throughout the city, cameras along the entire parade route, bomb sniffing dogs and, for the first time, the use of metal detectors on every person entering the Rose Bowl.
New Orleans, like Pasadena, has received no credible terrorist threats regarding New Year’s weekend, but police in the Big Easy are not going to take it easy. Mayor Mitch Landrieu and law enforcement leaders planned to close Bourbon Street to all vehicles from New Year’s Eve through Monday night’s Sugar Bowl, turning the famous thoroughfare into a pedestrian-only zone.
The city’s other plans for additional security include 30 to 40 light towers, security towers staffed with police and temporary security cameras in the French Quarter and other “target areas.”
Once again, law enforcement officials in the city cited the truck attacks in Berlin and Nice as one of the impetuses for the added security this year. New Orleans plans to implement the same security measures for NBA All-Star Game weekend and Mardi Gras, both scheduled for February.
Geller said it’s a sign the terrorists are winning when they are forcing Americans to change their security practices primarily due to attacks that happened in Europe.
“They are succeeding in terrorizing the entire Western world,” she said.
Haney, on the other hand, does not think it’s necessarily a sign the terrorists are winning. But it could be, he said, if the U.S. fails to take more proactive measures against Islamic terror.
“As long as we remain incoherent in our domestic and foreign counter-terrorism policy, then they will see that as an opportunity, as a tactical opportunity, and they will continue to do these kinds of operations,” he claimed. “But as soon as we start demonstrating that we’re going to not react but we’re going to respond to it preemptively, that’ll change the dynamic.”
Hohmann admitted it gives terrorists a “sick” sense of victory when they force Americans to clamp down on the freedoms they enjoy. But the fact remains, he said, that Islamic terror is a huge problem in America as it is in Europe, and our leaders need to do all they can to deal with that problem.
“It starts with who we let into our country,” Hohmann explained. “Until we get a handle on our welcome-all, open-borders immigration system, which rubber stamps visas for students, workers, refugees, imams, entrepreneurs, you name it, for people in hostile Middle Eastern countries, I expect these attacks to continue, and they will get bigger and more fantastic until we eventually have another 9/11, or worse.”