The New Orleans Police Department released film from the attacker’s body camera on Friday. It shows the shootout between three officers and the attacker, whose truck hit people on Bourbon Street early on New Year’s Day, killing 14.
There is a video clip of two police officers with their guns drawn in front of an open door on the driver’s side of a white pickup truck. A voice can be heard saying “Put your hands up” before shots are fired, and police officers and some people on foot run away from the car. There was also a slower version of the same video shared by the police, along with a still picture of what looks like the attacker’s gun firing.
Details about the shooting, like the names of the police officers who killed the attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, were made public for the first time.
Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick of the police said that Sgt. Nigel Daggs, Officer Christian Beyer, and Officer Jacobie Jordan were the ones who shot the attacker. In the course of the killing, she said they “clearly” followed the law and department policy and called them “national heroes.” The video comes from someone else’s body camera, and that cop doesn’t seem to have fired his gun.
“At a news conference Friday morning, it was clear that the officers were following the rules,” she said. „That doesn’t worry us at all.”
Kirkpatrick said that Daggs has been a police officer for 21 years. She said that Beyer has been a cop for 11 months and Jordan for 9 months.
Someone who picked up the phone at a number listed for Daggs told a reporter to call the department’s press office.
Jordan didn’t answer right away when asked for a statement. No way to get in touch with Beyer.
Kirkpatrick said that Jordan and a fourth cop, 10-year veteran Joseph Rodrigue, who did not fire his gun, came away from the hospital with wounds to their thighs.
Kirkpatrick wouldn’t say if the cops might have been hit by friendly fire because he said the FBI would look into that.
Kirkpatrick announced this week that the department is hiring William Bratton, who has been the top cop in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, to help the city figure out how to make itself safer after the attack that killed three people.
After complaints about the security measures in place during the New Year’s events, Bratton, 77, was brought in as a tactical expert to look at the city’s security. He has been a police officer for more than 50 years.
Thursday, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell held a news conference to officially introduce Bratton to his new job. She said, “This is moving in the right direction in terms of improving public safety measures in the city of New Orleans as we get ready to host national events like the Super Bowl and even Mardi Gras.”
“We are taking action to make sure that our city is safe for our residents, our city is safe for our visitors, and for the long haul,” Cantrell said.
He said that he and his partners will be thinking about “how can we find problems that need to be fixed, new ones that came up because of that event in the area of counterterrorism?” The area where terrorists pose a threat is always shifting and growing.
He said, “The idea is a learning experience here, but that learning experience is then focused on prevention, making sure that doesn’t happen again.”
The details of the terrorist act are being looked into. Bollards, which are barriers for vehicles, were not in place on Bourbon Street, a busy street, at the time of the attack. The barriers, which sometimes didn’t work right, had been there for a few years and were taken down so that new ones could be put up before the city hosts the Super Bowl in February. The city also had access to the 700-pound steel Archer fences it had used in the past to keep busy streets safe but didn’t use them.
Cantrell and Kirkpatrick have defended the city’s action, saying that the French Quarter had temporary security measures, police cars, and a lot of police officers.
Kirkpatrick said last week, “This man was going to do his best, and if it wasn’t on Bourbon, he was going to go somewhere else.”
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