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Transit Police officer wounded in hunt for Tsarnaevs to retire due to his injuries

Dic Donahue, critically wounded in Watertown in April, 2013, announced his retirement from the Transit Police Department today:

Following my injury, I committed myself to returning to active service in the department. It took nearly two years to accomplish that goal, fighting through pain and limitations, but I had a lot of help from some amazing doctors, my family, and my fellow officers. I did not want it to be taken from me without a fight. Unfortunately, I must now acknowledge the extent of my injuries and limitations. Physically, I cannot perform at 100 percent and must do what is right for myself, my co-workers, and my department. Therefore, I will step away from the job that I love so much.

Donohue, 36, praised the first responders who saved his life and his fellow officers. In a statement, he said he is not bitter about the constant leg pain that is forcing his retirement.

I am alive, and I have many plans for the future. If I had a choice, I would continue to serve as a police officer for decades to come, but those were not the cards I was dealt.


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Comments

Watertown PD should pay for his retirement considering they are the ones which negligently wounded him.

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Which officer shot him? I sorta figured that was something that would not really be aggressively investigated

That said, . much respect for Officer Donahue - his retirement was hard earned

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They cannot confirm who shot him or what agency, the bullet is still in his leg. He will probably get a disability retirement. The Commonwealth pays, line of duty disability.

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I certainly hope that local police departments, including Boston PD, learned a thing or two from that horror show in Watertown.
I'm guessing (hoping) they did as I read this week that several local police departments have returned military style equipment.

Visited a family member recently whose home still has the bullet holes as a reminder of that night.

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The BPD were woefully under equipped and seems had regionally poor command and control during this incident (state police failure?). Most towns field modern sporting rifles(patrol rifles all aka AR/SCAR etc) in their squad cars and it is a far superior firearm than the pump action shotgun. BPD refuses to issue such rifles to patrol officers.

The excessive number of squad cars and uniformed officers was a major breakdown of communication. The armored cars etc are needed in limited circumstances but without fixing the earlier issue are secondary. Clogging the road with squad cars makes it difficult for the SWAT officers and armored cars to respond.

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all the officers from all over who "self-deployed" to the scene.

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I think the issue was that just about every law enforcement agency including sheriff's and local PDs from way out of town who may have been delivering Bearcats, K9 units and other SWAT stuff to BOS all ended up just wildly responding and many of them apparently either directly ignored their staging orders or just decided to show up on their own without any orders whatsoever.

Trying to remember the exact words I saw used in the report they released but I think the term was "self dispatch" or "self responded". Just learning that this sort of thing is possible is probably one of the Big Lessons Learned from the event.

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Watching the events unfold in San Bernadino recently, the "experts" on the CNN panel watching the live feed, mentioned multiple times that the officers responding must be reporting to their CO and that the ground commanding officers should know who and how many officers are in the immediate vicinity. I remembered that because I thought to myself that this may be because of the shit show in Watertown. Hopefully police departments are getting a better command of who is reporting to a live incident. Also, officers showing up to "assist" when ordered not to should be disciplined.

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.

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Self Deployment was a huge issue in this case. There was absolute chaos going on because of self deployment. Officer Donahue was a victim of "friendly fire" aka cross fire. He is lucky to be alive. Hopefully lessons are learned from this. I am not quite sure the Transit Police receive the same disability benefits as a municipal police officer. The MBTA is an "Authority" and they are under a different system then Local and The State Police are. In order for Donahue to receive 100% disabilty there would have to be legislation filed and passed accepting this. The bottom line is Officer Donahue can no longer do the job he loved.

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I don't understand the aversion to sporting rifles for BPD. There is also the NEUPD sporting rifle issue which came up recently. I keep hearing, "NEU has armed their officers with semi-automatic rifles..."...all along while they already carry semi-automatic pistols. I much rather have a member of the BPD be able to reliably defend by being able to sight in a target, than have them rely on a long shot with a short pistol. Especially after seeing how many innocents NYPD has hit with their pistols.

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Much less likely to miss and hurt someone with a rifle. Better sights and stability.

People freak out not understanding that the rifles are much safer than the police's duty pistols because of better accuracy.

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A rifle also has much greater lethal range and penetrating power than a pistol round (yes, you could argue that a .223 is at the lower end of that scale, but it's still a rifle). Big city police departments have historically issued pistols and shotguns (and, to a smaller extent, submachine guns) because their rounds are less likely to kill somebody after traveling through walls or over miles.

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.223 also known as 5.56mmx45mm (despite being better at going through armor) actually doesn't penetrates multiple layers of common building materials as readily as the common pistol calibers used by police. 9mmx19mm or 10mmx22mm (.40 S&W). This and the issue of body armor (the notorious bank robbery in CA) is why police have transitioned away from using MP5 or UZI submachineguns (9mmx19mm) to AR or M4 pattern carbines over the past 20 years.

Police use jacketed hollow points which while more deadly are actually safer to bystanders in that they are designed to stop in the first target struck and not over penetrate.

Shotguns are notorious for over penetrating and ricocheting indoors. Police only consider them "safer" in some situations because the shot slows down exponentially and arcs into the ground far sooner than pistol or rifle rounds. The usefulness of a nonlethal beanbag shell or a breaching shell for locked doors also cannot be discounted in police work.

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This is actually a myth. The higher velocity and lighter relative weight of rifle rounds pose much less of an over penetration risk than shotgun or pistol projectiles. Momentum cause over penetration risk in pistol rounds, which traditionally have 2-3 times the mass of a .223 rifle round.

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The clusterbang in Watertown had less to do with BPD not equipping every car with a rifle and more to do with the complete breakdown in command and control, interagency squabbling, and rampant "self-deployment."

Adam mirrors the full Harvard analysis.

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Although I agree that the after-action report brought up all of the problems with the "self deployment" overwhelming any command and control. The events described in the report took place hours after the fire fight where Officer Donohue was wounded.

There are questions about the sheer number of rounds fired and the bullet holes in the neighboring houses. Fortunately no civilians were injured or worse by the police fire.

Yet I find it perfectly understandable that in the middle of the fight when there are homemade bombs being thrown and officers wondering about suicide explosives, that there wouldn't be a shoot first mentality. Clearly this was a situation that was well beyond any training that any of the officers had recieved.

I wish Dick Donohue that he be healed from any more pain and live an enjoyable life.

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The bigger picture here is Martial Law. Police took people out of their homes at gun point and illegally searched. Too bad nobody has the balls to file a class action lawsuit.

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Is on sale at CVS this week.

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"The bigger picture here is Martial Law. Police took people out of their homes at gun point and illegally searched. Too bad nobody has the balls to file a class action lawsuit."

A good project for you in the spring. Alll it takes is one person to stand up......

Good Luck

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Listen, I don't have a clue what it was like on other streets or in the earlier hours of the manhunt, but this is just not what our experience was. Our house (three apartments) was searched by Cambridge SWAT, who were friendly and professional and asked permission. They didn't come in our apartment because we'd been home since the shooting started. It was later in the day, and I can easily imagine there was a greater urgency in the early hours of the manhunt, on streets closer to where the initial confrontation was. If this was as widespread as you suggest I am surprised to hear that some enterprising attorney hasn't started one, but of course you're welcome to volunteer to be the lead plaintiff.

There are plenty of places to find fault in how the manhunt went down. I'm no knee-jerk defender of the police when I think they've done something wrong. But I have to speak up in defense of the officers who came to my neighborhood and did the hard work of tracking down this kid to try to keep him from hurting anyone else even if we now know he probably wasn't in any kind of shape to inflict more damage. The ones we dealt with weren't thugs on a power trip; they were doing their job and doing it well. I'm glad that someone with body armor and training was checking to make sure there wasn't an angry teenager building another bomb in my basement, and I appreciate what all of those folks did for my neighborhood that day.

To get back to the main point: I'm sad to hear this news and I wish things could have gone differently for Officer Donahue.

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Thank you for your service. A special thank you to the Doctors, nurses, Fire and EMS and citizens of New England whose heroism saved hundreds of lives during those tragic days.

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It was pointed out shortly afterwards that every victim who made it alive to a hospital lived. Both the first responders and civilians who gave on-site aid so they could get there and the hospital staff who treated them once they arrived did amazing things.

That's Boston Strong. (Or as Big Papi put it, OFC.)

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