On Wednesday, New Orleans was primed for a party.
That’s not surprising. The city starts celebrating Mardi Gras on Monday for an event that doesn’t take place until March 4. The French Quarter ratchets up to a fever pitch of music, parades, beignets and alcohol.
And so it makes sense for the city to be flexing its celebratory muscles on New Year’s Day as people poured in for the Sugar Bowl pitting Georgia and Notre Dame in the second round of the College Football Playoff.
No one was ready for an Army veteran from Texas to use a pickup as a weapon at 3:15 a.m. In another city, the streets would have been all but empty, but not New Orleans. Police say Shamsud-Din Jabbar zipped around a blockade and plowed into a crowd. Fourteen people died. Another 35 were injured, including Jeremi Sensky, 51, of Canonsburg. The driver was killed in a subsequent shootout that also injured two officers.
How could you be ready for that? Sadly, it’s a question more and more cities have to answer. Two such attacks happened in Germany (five killed, more than 200 injured) and China (35 dead) in recent months. Canada saw similar attacks in 2021 and 2018. An attack on a New York bike path in 2017 claimed eight lives, while a white supremacist drove his car into protesters during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, killing one woman and injuring many more.
And those are just the major headlines of a growing trend in public violence.
In preparation for the rescheduled Sugar Bowl, New Orleans police took steps to “harden” the area. They brought in barriers and heavy equipment, increased personnel deployment and cut off the kind of access that would make another vehicle attack possible.
It’s preparation New Orleans already was considering in anticipation of next month’s Super Bowl.
Pittsburgh does not have the same kind of perpetual party atmosphere as New Orleans, but it is a city with major draws such as Acrisure Stadium, PNC Park and PPG Paints Arena. It has festivals such as Picklesburgh and events such as the Pittsburgh Marathon. And, in 2026, Pittsburgh will host the NFL Draft, which could bring more than 700,000 people.
Is Pittsburgh ready?
The Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 1, the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police’s union, says 103 sworn officers left the bureau in 2024. Of those, 66 were retirees, and 36 were resigning officers. Twelve of the resignations were recruits.
“We’re just waiting for the levee to break,” said union President Robert Swartzwelder.
While Pittsburgh leadership says there are 712 officers and 49 recruits in training, Swartzwelder puts that number at a radically different 644 — making allowances for those on various leaves, absences or command duties.
Either way, it’s far below the 850 officer target for 2024 or Mayor Ed Gainey’s adjusted 800 officer mark for 2025.
Gainey’s budget trimmed fat by not planning for the full complement of officers who weren’t there. There is logic to that. But it also reflects a lack of urgency to replace officers — especially when the bureau doesn’t even have a chief since the resignation of Larry Scirotto in November.
That’s something that needs to be considered before more big events are pursued. A Kenny Chesney concert can stretch services with arrests, citations, fights, medical emergencies and other events requiring a police response, in addition to the simple traffic demands of about 60,000 people at Acrisure.
Now multiply that by 10 times or more — and add in things like a man in a pickup looking to cause chaos.
Is Pittsburgh — with 103 fewer officers than it had last year — ready for that? It has a year to figure it out.