Ex-Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis went to bed on New Year’s Eve with a nagging feeling that something bad might happen, but while crowds started to break up without incident in other large cities, his “worst fears came true” in New Orleans.

Davis, who led the Boston Marathon Bombing response in 2013 and now heads a security services firm, said he was on high alert due to the terror attack that occurred earlier this holiday season in Germany, when a man drove into a Christmas market, killing five people and injuring 200 others.

“Whenever there’s an attack like that, my former colleagues ramp up our preventative measures,” Davis told the Herald Wednesday. “The terrible fact in this business is that copycats are frequently the cause of follow-on attacks. This is sort of a classic example of that.”

A driver rammed a truck into a crowd of New Orleans revelers around 3:15 a.m. Wednesday along Bourbon Street, killing 10 people and injuring 35 others in what the FBI is investigating as a terror attack.

Davis said the investigation will involve evaluating whether there were any security failures, pointing to the bollards that were down for repairs on Bourbon Street.

He mentioned, however, that the driver struck at a time when people were breaking down their security protocols for the holiday event — which may have been part of the planning with the suspect lying in wait for barricades to be removed.

Daniel Linskey, an ex-Boston Police superintendent-in-chief, who oversaw the Marathon Bombing response and investigation, said if the driver was able to get around any of the stationary barriers designed to prevent vehicles from accessing congested areas during the festivities, that constituted a security failure.

Linskey said there are measures other cities like Boston can and does take to prevent or mitigate similar attacks at large-scale events, citing weapons screening, intelligence protocols, and barriers that were in place during First Night festivities — but no approach is fool-proof.

“Can we prevent somebody who is hell-bent on causing death and destruction from doing that? No, there’s no way to make the entire city of Boston safe 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” Linskey told the Herald. “Law enforcement has to be right every day, and the bad guy has to just get lucky one time.”

Mayor Michelle Wu, addressing the New Orleans attack after an unrelated event on Wednesday, said it was “unthinkable that on the day of celebration, something so devastating would happen.”

The mayor, while expressing confidence in Boston’s public safety planning for large-scale events, said the city has been “quite lucky” in avoiding the unexpected catastrophic events that have dominated recent headlines in other places.

“We host some of the largest public events anywhere in the country, with the Boston Marathon and other celebrations throughout the year, and so there’s always a sense that months of planning can go into it,” Wu told reporters. “The unexpected can always happen, but we do our very best with the technology, the preparation, the coordination to make sure that all of those situations are accounted for.”

City Councilor Ed Flynn, who is considering a bid for mayor, called the terrorist attack “an attack on America.” He pointed to the City Council’s acceptance of $12 million federal anti-terrorism grant for the region last month, saying that it was critical for Boston to “continue to coordinate and work closely with city, state and federal law enforcement agencies.”

“We must always be vigilant and prepared,” Flynn said.

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Davis, for his part, sees Boston as being “well-placed” to deal with a threat at major events, but the problem is, he said, “these things can happen anywhere.”

While the latest attack will have security implications throughout the country, Davis said, starting with this week’s Sugar Bowl and next month’s Super Bowl in New Orleans, he hopes it doesn’t deter people from taking part in future large-scale events.

“I mean, honestly,” Davis said, “We can’t let the terrorists win.”