New Orleans, La - As fans made their way to the Mercedes Benz Superdome, it was hands up for a pat down in one of the last lines of defense when it comes to Super Bowl Security.
"I think we're putting on a good show and it's a safe show," said Lt. Col. Jerry Sneed, Deputy Mayor of Public Safety.
Sneed says just about everything has gone as planned and says he's especially pleased with the lead security agency, the New Orleans Police Department. "You can see the vests everywhere. Officers are doing their job. They're moving traffic," added Sneed.
Lt. Col. Sneed says the morning of the Super Bowl there was a ticket snatching. There were officers so close who were able to quickly catch the thief and return the tickets to their rightful owner. "I would think that those guests are going to really talk good about the NOPD," he said.
His thinking would be right. Fans had lots of praise for the security effort. "A lot of police around and feeling very safe," said one fan.
"Everywhere we look there are police on the street," added another.
Even though security is getting high marks, Sneed says lessons will be learned through a security performance reviews. "There's a couple of things that haven't worked as smoothly as we wanted it to," said Sneed. "We're going to take a few days. We'll do an after-action review to make sure we've captured what we did well, what we didn't do so well and modify things should we have to."
