Some Bay Area event planners have long feared the type of horror that befell New Orleans’ Bourbon Street in the first few hours of 2025 when a U.S. Army veteran used a pickup truck as a battering ram to kill more than a dozen people and maim even more, using one of the most basic tools of transportation.
One reason: Such attacks, repurposing as a weapon one of the millions of vehicles that are on the roads every day, are so difficult to stop.
“That’s been a concern from the beginning — we’ve always talked about that,” said Shari Godinez, executive director of Koreatown Northgate Community Benefit District, which regularly hosts a popular monthly block party on Telegraph Avenue along the edge of downtown Oakland.
Police leaders and event planners across the Bay Area on Thursday said they planned to confer and review security plans in light of the attack in New Orleans that left at least 14 people dead and dozens of others injured early Wednesday morning. Just hours later, a Tesla Cybertruck packed with explosive material exploded outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas, putting police departments across the nation on heightened alert. Officials have not offered any possible link between the two incidents.
By Thursday afternoon, some local block party organizers said they planned to press ahead with their events, albeit with a heightened vigilance. And while vowing to review security plans, they also lamented the difficult nature of guarding against a weapon as ordinary as a car or truck.
“You can’t live in fear and not have events,” said Godinez, whose next Oakland First Fridays event is scheduled to take place March 7 along Telegraph Avenue from West Grand to 27th Street. She said she planned to meet with the Oakland Police Department in the coming weeks to discuss ways to ensure the event, which already includes barriers at each entrance, remains safe.
“We just have to do our best in making sure the community watches out for each other,” she said.
Across the Bay Bridge, the San Francisco Police Department said it was “closely monitoring” the situations in New Orleans and Las Vegas and that “we are not aware of any credible threats to San Francisco.” Their statement came hours ahead of the year’s first Downtown First Thursdays event at 2nd Street and Market Street, which was slated to include live music and street performances. Messages from this news organization to the event’s organizers were not immediately returned.
“Our officers are on heightened alert and are prepared to respond to any incident that may occur,” the San Francisco Police Department’s statement read. “The SFPD will be fully staffed for all major events in the coming weeks and months.”
On Thursday, the FBI said an Army veteran appeared to be acting alone when he drove a pickup truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers along New Orleans’ Bourbon Street. The man, who later died in a firefight with police, was an American citizen from Texas who posted several videos onto Facebook in the hours before the attack proclaiming his support for the Islamic State militant group.
The attack came just weeks after a motorist drove into a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg, killing five people, including a 9-year-old boy, and injuring more than 200. Federal officials had issued a warning to local law enforcement agencies some two weeks before the attack urging them to be vigilant about similar incidents.
The New Orleans case marked the latest example of people using vehicles as weapons. In November, a 62-year-old driver killed 35 people exercising at a sports complex in China, while the deadliest such attack left 86 people dead across the French city of Nice in 2016.
In the Bay Area, a driver’s 2006 hit-and-run spree killed one person in Fremont and continued in San Francisco, leaving 18 people injured. The driver in that case, Omeed Popal, was sent to a state psychiatric hospital.
Such events remain “relatively rare,” said Michelle Rippy, an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at CSU East Bay, in an email. Still, they pose a particular concern, given the ease with which someone can acquire a vehicle and the way a car or truck can be weaponized with little effort, she said.
Just this past weekend, a motorist nearly hit several people at a festival in San Jose while trying to evade police.
Just before 5 p.m. on Saturday, a man drove a gray sedan through the Christmas in the Park event at the city’s Plaza de Cesar Chavez while fleeing police who had tried to pull him over for an alleged traffic violation. Video from the event showed at least one person diving out of the way of the car as it hopped into a sidewalk and sped away.
San Jose police arrested the driver the following day and booked him into the Santa Clara County jail on suspicion of reckless driving and evading a police officer, as well as for hit and run.
The event’s managing director, Debbie Degutis, outlined several differences between the incident at her event and the carnage in New Orleans — chiefly, that the motorist who traveled through Christmas in the Park event appeared to be running from the cops, not targeting people, though the challenge for organizers of any such event is to keep vehicular traffic away from pedestrians, regardless of a driver’s intent.
“He was scared — he wasn’t angry — and to us, there’s a big difference,” said Degutis, adding that “timing was everything” because relatively few people were at the event at that hour of the day. “He had an opportunity to leave the area, so he did.”
In the hours after the New Orleans attack, San Jose police dispatched several more officers to the Christmas in the Park event to guard against any potential copycats, said San Jose assistant police chief Brian Shab. The department received no advance warning of any imminent threats. Rather, the extra security was ordered because “we wanted people to feel safe that they could go to this wonderful event,” Shab said.
The increased security proved fleeting, as Wednesday marked the event’s final day of the season. Yet Degutis said she’d consult with city officials on whether any changes were needed when the event resumes in November.
“That’s the last thing we want people to worry about,” Degutis said. She said the event is a place for “all of San Jose to feel safe, make memories and spread joy. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in a place where people can’t gather and create community.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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