Early on New Year’s Day, police say, a 42-year-old Army veteran drove a rented truck flying a black ISIS flag into a crowd of New Orleans revelers, killing at least 15 people and injuring over 30 more. The attack, which the FBI is investigating as an act of terrorism, comes on the heels of a similar attack at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, that killed five and injured dozens, and it follows an FBI warning to law enforcement on Dec. 6 to prepare for low-tech vehicle ramming attacks at outdoor crowds during the holiday season.
The New Orleans attack seems to have been planned to create as much harm as possible, including the attacker's use of an electric truck rented on a car-sharing app, which provided low-cost, easy access to a vehicle. And the apparent ease with which the perpetrator planned and executed the attack — despite the FBI warning — suggests our national strategy for preventing mass violence and violent extremism is failing.
Most terrorist attacks in the U.S. come from people who have no affiliation with formal groups.
A main prevention strategy for the U.S. government in this area is called “secondary prevention,” and it is almost entirely focused on stopping an already-radicalized actor from effectively executing an attack. Other countries put more emphasis on both primary prevention (preventing people from becoming radicalized in the first place) and tertiary prevention (deradicalization and disengagement of already-committed extremists). Taken together, these three approaches are intended to reduce extremist groups’ ability to recruit and radicalize followers and mobilize them to violence.
Secondary prevention, while important at reducing the risk of imminent violent attacks, is essentially a “see something, say something” approach to prevention. It relies on the timely and effective execution of security strategies like surveillance, monitoring and infiltration of groups alongside a healthy dose of sheer luck, often from good Samaritans who report possible threats or concerning behaviors from individuals. A 2022 white supremacist plot to start a riot at an Idaho Pride parade was thwarted, for example, when a tipster called to say that a “little army was loading up” into a U-Haul in a hotel parking lot.
But most terrorist attacks in the United States come from people who have no affiliation with formal groups — even if they are inspired by propaganda produced from those groups. There is much unknown or unconfirmed about the New Orleans attacker’s ideology, motive or possible group affiliation. We have learned from similar mass atrocities, however, that lone-actor attacks are extremely difficult to prevent with secondary prevention tactics alone. Violent actors today — including “homegrown extremists” who may pledge support to foreign terrorist organizations but generally receive no direct operational support from them — are almost always radicalized and mobilized through exposure to online propaganda. In most cases, they have no formal engagement with extremist groups at all.
It is impossible to infiltrate a group that doesn’t exist, just as it’s hard to surveil a lone actor who isn’t communicating with a terrorist cell commander. This is where “primary prevention” — a strategy focused on decreasing the attractiveness of violence and steering people away from radicalizing pathways — can make a real difference, but if only we would invest in it.
Some primary prevention works through media and digital literacy efforts to help people be more skeptical of content they encounter online. People can learn to recognize manipulative propaganda and tactics and reject the overtures of bad actors who are trying to radicalize them — in part because people don’t like to find out they are being manipulated and are smart enough to reject persuasive scammers and extremist tactics once they learn about them.
Early prevention also requires addressing the root causes that underpin people’s attraction to extremist ideologies in the first place — including, for many lone actors, a yearning for a greater sense of meaning or purpose in their lives.
Prevention approaches can recognize vulnerable people and offer them other outlets to find meaning
This is especially true for veterans, who have disproportionately engaged in violent extremism in ways that are both predictable and preventable. The vast majority of veterans are peaceful, law-abiding citizens. But for some, the loss of a sense of duty, belonging to a cause and heroic engagement they found in the military can create vulnerabilities as they transition to civilian lives. Propagandists exploit these vulnerabilities by offering a twisted sense of brotherhood and what can seem like a purposeful quest for individual significance. Prevention approaches can recognize vulnerable people and offer them other outlets to find meaning and engage heroically — as recent initiatives in Germany have done by working with youth sports and firefighting programs or in the United States by engaging veterans as election monitors.
Our current approach to preventing mass atrocity attacks, in which we hope that every bad actor can be stopped in the nick of time, requires us to be perfect every time. But when any car is a weapon in any crowd and too many of us spend our time alone immersed in harmful online worlds, we can’t rely on interrupting plots to keep us safe.
As another year begins, in this moment of new resolutions, maybe we can finally resolve to do better.
