Never Again

After the Super Bowl riots and the death of a young Bostonian fan, we thought the city and the fans had learned their lesson. Apparently BPD didn't get that memo. While tens of thousands of fans partied in a much more controlled environment than they did last February, a policeman reacted to a threat with fear and violence, using his pepper-spray-pellet shooter like a machine gun, and killing Victoria Snelgrove, an Emerson student.

Many will react to the above paragraph by saying that I'm overreacting, jumping on a bandwagon, or blaming the police for something the hooligans did. However, when I say that could have been my sister, I mean it quite literally; she was part of that crowd of thousands for at least a few minutes, and she certainly wasn't drunk or threatening cops.

Certainly, no mercy should be granted to the "knuckleheads". Make the punishment fit the crime: snag 'em and lock 'em up without bail and without TV or any other news source for the entirety of the World Series; then prosecute them to the full extent of the law. I have zero sympathy for these fools; they posed, no doubt, a greater danger to my sister's health, if not her life, with their drunken stunts. I can't help noting, though, that they've at least been more discriminating in their visigothery: the only car to be torched had New York tags.

If the knuckleheads are to blame for the incident, how can I blame the police for the death?

Simple: the number one duty of the police in this situation is to make things better, never worse. As in Denver during their Super Bowl riots, insufficiently trained police reacted by making the situation worse; fatally worse. Officers who do not have drilled into their skulls what is appropriate range for one of their weapons, and what is an appropriate way to deal with crowd violence, should not be holding potentially lethal weapons. It's as simple as that. They can be there, but only those who have undergone effective crowd control training should be allowed to wield and use things like rubber bullet and pepper spray cannister guns.

Here are InstantReplay's Top Ten Tips for handling future Boston wins:

• 10. Install conspicuous, temporary cameras in key areas (Hemenway, Lansdowne, Kenmore) and use them liberally in making post-facto arrests.
• 9. Arrest anyone who steps out of line. Don't wait for people to escalate violations. If somebody climbs a billboard or a store awning, a cop should be there to arrest them in 60 seconds. There'll be more arrests, but the level of gamesmanship won't escalate.
• 8. Check ID's. If you're not from New England, you don't have a right to riot. Go back to your dorm and root for the New Jersey Devils or the Pittsburgh Pirates or something.
  
• 7. If it's not already on the books, put a public drunkenness law in effect temporarily. This will give the cops a good way to nab people who haven't broken any other law yet but are clearly headed for trouble. Disturbance of the peace is another good one they've been using, but it's tougher to prove than public drunkenness.
• 6. Force the teams to hold Games 7 during the day or early evening. Put your foot down. People have way too much time to drink with 8:30pm starts. That's too late for us East-Coasters anyway.
• 5. Hold better riot training and differentiate between experts and laymen. Use close, personal tactics, singling out lawbreakers and arresting them. Use overpowering force: three officers per arrestee. Use paddywagons, and fill 'em up with punks. These aren't tough mobsters or even angry strikers; they're drunk children, and they'll ditch their lawbreaking friends in a hurry if they see targeted, determined police honing in on one person at a time. And keep the guns aimed below the shoulders.
• 4. Write a ticketing law for "Accessory to Destruction of Private Property" or something for those who are caught on-camera not blatantly participating in car-flipping, etc, but also not trying to stop it. It's way too easy to be on the edge, egging on the grandstanders. A $250 ticket would be a deterrent to those who flirt with the law, and would be a way of bringing home to parents and schools what their kids are involved in.
• 3. Convince universities to expel anyone arrested or ticketed for any reason during riots. Also convince them to hold on-campus rallies, and find ways to send them the bill for destruction caused by poor preparation and poor campus policing. To date, the schools have been perfectly happy to send students off-campus to wreak havoc elsewhere.
  
• 2. If it gets really bad, use water cannons to hose down the crowd. Nothing sends people home in New England as quickly as icewater. It should only be used, however, on truly dangerous, out-of-control crowds, such as the car-flipping hooligans of the post-Super Bowl, etc.
• 1. Recognize the energy, and channel it; don't fight it. The City needs to plan victory events to draw the peaceful fans. These could include fireworks, an outdoor concert, ticker-tape, a flyover, etc. Fans need a way to participate in something larger than themselves; if they can't find a productive way to do it, they'll go along with the destructive.