WAS: What Adults are Saying About a Public Information Failure

New Orleans' top cop and leaders were abysmal

Lucid communication during an unfolding public crisis is one of the most critical responsibilities of any public official. Every syllable of every comment is attended laser-like for a variety of emerging needs including personal safety of all those within earshot. Instantly that information is squeezed into multiple shapes to serve multiple audiences. For those bearing the news the demand for high competency is extreme—but also—a contingency for which leaders are broadly trained and their effective performance is expected. This is necessary for the both the public safety and interest and to avoid the career-killing Al Haig moment.

The unspeakable New Year’s horror on New Orlean’s Bourbon Street continues to unfold at this hour. Seemingly the public, there and elsewhere, is not in immediate danger and the coming days will bring more clarity. That’s not because those first informing the public in the earliest hour’s of 2025 were competent or even nominally effective. In fact it was just the opposite.

Longtime Pittsburgh news and Public Relations pro Paul Furiga is a master at telling and knowing how to develop a story and an expert at stories and their telling in crisis communication situations. In fact so much so he has written the book on it here. For generations he has taught students and led many clients through unfolding business or public crises and almost always starts his time sensitive work with the same premise: Any crisis is either an action of God or Man made worse (or not) by the subsequent actions of God or Man. It is a piercing approach that rapidly gets all cognitively aligned to deal with real crisis contours without making stuff worse. By this nomenclature what happened in Louisiana was a man-made crisis, further worsened by man.

Louisiana leaders in general and New Orleans Police superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick in particular, evidently have never heard of Furiga, nor carefully attended to the volumes of media training they surely received as part of their professional training. If they had its doubtful the string of crisis communication cardinal sins they bore would have been seen or heard. How the crisis communication was first handled—and was continually handled for at least 24 hours— was in a word, incompetent. There was plenty of blame to spread but no one publicly failed so miserably, at a critical time, as Kirkpatrick.

Consider just her initial public briefing early on January 1st where among many things she did the following:

1. Summarized the total number of injured and identified the number of said patients who were transferred to specific New Orleans hospitals. She ticked through the numbers like she was completing a delegate count at a county political convention, all the while, describing how many patients were sent to specific locations. The problem is this type of specificity serves to create more problems.

   First, as a hospital scrambles to accommodate and triage the many patients flooding its halls, so too is concurrent strain developing on its security and public information resources. The chaos of a violent crisis encountered there means patient care is paramount as health care providers launch into their own specialized, contingency training. Anything else is regarded as outside noise that interferes with working the crisis.

   Secondly when criminal activity is at work, providing such specificity does not just alert the public, but potential accomplices as well. So a would-be party to the carnage would be essentially issued a blueprint about where to go next to inflict optimum damage. Moreover, literally within seconds of her exhaustive list, Kirkpatrick then said she didn’t think the alleged perp had acted alone! Reviewing eyes have a difficult time recalling a bigger numb skull example than this of a public official so blatantly inviting further danger to an unfolding, fluid situation.

2. Kirkpatrick was disingenuous—a super big no no in any crisis. Within a few hours she was already concluding her department had a “security plan in place” that amid the revelry of New Year’s was “defeated by the terrorist.” Remember Kirkpatrick is talking about the French Quarter in her city—one of the world’s most famous party districts 365 nights a year. When video quickly came to light showing said “defeat” was little more than a criminal making a wide turn around a parked patrol car, her credibility was forever dashed.

3. She speculated and surmised.

4. She went beyond the mere facts of what she would have possibly known at that early hour when discussing potential conspirators and that explosive devices (may or may not—who knows?) still be present in the French Quarter.

There was more, but the mess she had already created was enough. Late on January 2nd she was still appearing regularly on national newscasts looking like a person who was either in shock, mindful of her initial, monumental screw-up, about to lose her job for assorted reasons or some combination thereof. Had she been doing Vaudeville, a large shepherd’s crook would have appeared from the wings mercifully yanking her offstage. Remember Kirkpatrick previously lead local police forces in both Oakland and Spokane. It is incomprehensible that she might have risen through her career ranks while showing such a dangerous Achilles heel in the pressured moment of public crisis.

Others shared in her performative disgrace. The one-day postponement of the Sugar Bowl, and then its playing under continued controversy and security concerns, surely had sport-jacketed shills and ESPN execs huddled on how to get the game done. This way advertising revenue could still be largely preserved and eventual game winner Notre Dame might escape town bound for the next “tournament” stop in Miami. Louisiana’s Attorney General openly disagreed with this decision further adding to the chaos.

Police and other public officials consistently referenced how they were so “deeply experienced” in big event security while the tally of a contradicting failure continued to rise. They also were either too shocked, hung-over or dim to recognize the very painful irony.

But perhaps the most egregious public safety bumble was from the management of the Fair Grounds—New Orleans’ winter home for thoroughbred racing—located but three miles from Bourbon Street. A mere eight hours after the attack started, this franchise of Churchill Downs Incorporated (a growing cancer within the struggling racing industry), was loading horses into the gate so a day of festive racing might commence! Eight hours!

Meanwhile in the very early phase of community recovery many in New Orleans speak of the resiliency shown by its people. Naturally, they point to the horrors brought by Katrina a generation ago as partial evidence. But that resiliency may also be needed to combat what is seemingly endless, dim-witted, tone-deaf, incompetent leadership from its community and business leaders. Unfortunately, an American city someday (perhaps soon), will again suffer a terrorist attack. May it not suffer that poor fate with so much public incompetence as seen here.