Everyone seems to be gushing over the police work in Boston. I think the whole thing was a massive screw up. The perp escaped on foot, badly injured, dripping blood, and they could neither follow nor find him. Thousands of cops combed the area, but he was marginally outside their perimeter, and only about 1/2 mile from where the preceding fire fight took place. Oops. They lock down a city of over a million because 1 desperate, wounded criminal is on the lam. Meanwhile, in 1 day, there were at least 8 shootings in Chicago, but I digress.
How do they find the guy? Moments after the stay-inside order was lifted, a resident finds the perp hiding in the boat in his yard.
All of this because ordinary citizens were able to identify the two brothers from cell phone pictures and other videos. Other than actually publicizing the pictures and dragging the near-dead guy out of the boat, a law enforcement contingent of thousands accomplished very little, while ordinary citizens were responsible for almost everything that did not involve firing hundreds of rounds of ordnance.
MEH!
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Friday, November 22, 2024, Joe Marangell
1 day ago
7 comments:
Indeed meh. I did think when reading the press over here about it that how come a bleeding fugitive with a firearm end up in someone's yard hiding in a boat? What were the police actually doing? Don't read me wrong, It's good to have him finally caught, but it did smack of too many cooks...
Cheers,
W.
And am I the only one who thinks it odd that nobody mentions that the person who found the suspect in his boat was a fool? He knows there's a manhunt on, he sees something suspicious, he sees blood on the tarp and he approaches and lifts the tarp to see what's underneath and then finds the perp. He is danged lucky he didn't get shot and killed by the guy right then and there.
Wayne -
I thought the over-reaction was astounding. Add in the non-result, and it's grimly humorous.
Cathy -
My lovely wife also pointed this out. He's lucky he didn't get his face shot off. I would have quietly slunk back into the house and called 911.
But you're right - that is going unmentioned in the media.
Cheers!
JzB
I don't know that as a cop commanding the search for a suspect of this nature that I'd do much better. Consider that you're hunting someone who's committed a heinous crime, with apparently every incentive to commit more. The likelihood he will do would seem to increase as time goes by. Also the distance he might have traveled (call it "r") increases as time goes by, so the area he might be concealed in increases as r-squared as time passes.
So, simple algebra dictates that the area being searched should be saturated with hunters as quickly as possible. Granted, most of the searchers will come up with nothing. But I'd rather have say a thousand guys searching a ten square mile area for three hours, with one of them finally locating the suspect, than ten guys searching over a thousand square miles and not finding the suspect for three weeks.
Sure, in retrospect, the cops seem to have gone over the top. But it's easy to imagine scenarios in which they didn't overreact and the bomber might have committed a stream of atrocities.
The idiocy is stunning and in plentiful supply. And the waste of ordinance....well, hey, is it tacky to blame Spaghetti Westerns?
Off to die of sarcasm overdose, now...
And now that you guys have all that out of your system, go see what a former cop thinks of the Watertown PD's response. Hint: He isn't nearly as critical as you guys.
And hey, at least the cops weren't as stupid as those hipster douchebags who stood upright in their windows iTubing a gunfight on their MaxiPads and iFones, thereby giving evolution some opportunity to act (but, sadly, it didn't).
It's dangerous work, for sure, and sometimes terrifying.
In the actual fire fight, I'll take nothing away from the Watertown Police Force.
I heard that the injured cop bled out and his heart had stopped for several minutes. It's a miracle they could save his life. I just hope blood/oxygen deprivation didn't cause brain damage. Really high marks to the Boston area medical teams for all their life saving efforts after the bombing and the rest of the follow up.
But it's still true that a badly wounded perp got away on foot, the lock down was counter-productive, and an ordinary citizen uncovered the guy, pretty much by accident.
My main objection is to the dramatic over-reaction in the greater Boston area, and the intense and largely fruitless involvement of multiple enforcement agencies. The continuous TV coverage probably made the whole thing a lot worse.
JzB
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