PARK CITY, Utah — Park City, Utah – In a few weeks, the streets here will fill with visitors attending the Sundance Film Festival.
A few months after that, the Park Silly Sunday Market will draw thousands.
And in nine years, the Winter Olympics will ski and slide into Park City.
The town’s police chief, Wade Carpenter, said his officers protect dozens of special events every year.
“We staff up every day during special events,” Carpenter said.
The chief said that federal and state agencies keep Park City apprised of threats. As for someone driving through a crowd, like what happened on New Year’s Day in New Orleans, it’s something his department safeguards to prevent.
“We have a of bollarding that can completely shut off a lot of these side streets, as well, to mitigate as much risk as we possibly can,” Carpenter said.
Carpenter said his department also has a variety of other traffic barriers they can place around town.
“That being said, there’s no perfect plan,” Carpenter acknowledged.
The 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics “was ahead of the game” by cordoning sidewalks, says Scott Decker, a senior scientist at the Center for Naval Analysis who has written about Olympic security.
He thinks what happened in New Orleans will be studied by people protecting the Olympics. So will school shootings and other types of one-person attacks.
Decker is concerned about so-called plastic firearms made by 3D printers that can avoid metal detectors. And while law enforcement can use drones to monitor events, Decker is worried about drones carrying weapons.
“The drones,” Decker said, “are going to be a real game changer on both sides, frankly – law violators and law enforcers.” For the 2034 Olympics, Park City will host skiing and snowboarding events as well as bobsled, skeleton and luge. Park City was also a venue during the 2002 Games.
“The Olympics is a very different security plan,” Carpenter said, “in the sense that you have pretty much unlimited resources and you have the ability to completely shut down all ingress into the city.”
The Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute estimates the federal government will pay $188 million in security for the 2034 Olympics.