It seems to me that a lot of the discussion thus far has been whether or not the BPD were justified in A) approaching a man for an open container after the game and/or B) apprehending him after he attempted to flee.
This can be debated. Personally, I don't think enough is known to judge whether or not the BPD was justified in approaching/arresting him. Certainly, Police use discretion all the time and I have not heard enough of the facts to know if their actions were appropriate.
The real issue to me here is what happened after the arrest and if excessive force was used to make the arrest. I do not trust that the BPD will conduct an completely transparent investigation when they have a clear interest in the outcome of the investigation. I suspect that this will all be hashed our many months later in court.
Fact remains out of the 3 recent deaths after celebrations, the Boston Police were directly involved in 2 of them. Fairly or unfairly, this is the case and I don't blame people for calling into question the judgment of our law enforcement.
If you ever get into an accident with someone who has road rage and a cop is witnessing it but decides to walk away while the guy starts to pummel you ask yourself this:
Do you want police doing their job appropriately or not?
The debate isn't whether the police approaching the guy who was openly drinking in public was appropriate or not. It was. They were doing their job.
The debate is whether you want police to appropriately do their job all the time or just when the law that's being broken is harmless in your mind.
Many here see drinking in public as a harmless crime so the police are at fault. But it is a crime and the police can not indescriminately determine which crimes are worth addressing and which are not.
They decided to address this crime, probably because during shift report they got directions from their superiors to address these situations if the Celtics won. The subject fled instead of allowing the police to properly handle the situation.
For all we know they may have just confiscated the alcohol and let them on their way. We don't know because the subject fled. All other options are now out the window, the police have had their hands forced and the subject is in for a bad time.
Let's face it there are a lot of crimes that people perceive as harmless and that they we view police action against as overboard. Smoking pot, drinking in public, playing music excessively loud, speeding. There are lots more. But if police officers turn a cheek on these crimes what happens when one of these crimes leads to something worse.
Like someone smoking weed falling in front of a car that causes an accident. Someone drinking in public causing a fight that gets someone hurt or killed. Someone playing loud music keeping up an entire neighborhood who has to go to work in the morning. Someone speeding not seeing that kid crossing the street.
My guess is while you are looking over the mess caused by these harmless crimes the first words out of your mouth will be:
"Where's a cop when you need him?"
As for the BPD doing a proper investigation. All those TV shows that depict cops hating cops that are in Internal Affairs aren't far from the truth. IA usually does a very thorough job and hang a lot of bad cops out to dry. Good cops who make stupid mistakes too. Those guys in IA aren't very well liked.
I know, my cousin is one in the BPD. And he's the nicest guy you will ever meet. But guys in the field aren't usually very interested in talking to him, even over coffee at DD.
Topic: Investigation launched into death of Celtics fan (Read 35371 times)