The Globe reports Boston Police are investigating an incident at Washington and Lesher streets in Roslindale in which an officer trying to get a suspect into a cruiser during an arrest briefly put his hands on the guy's neck - after the guy started resisting getting into the cruiser and screaming as a crowd of his pals rushed the scene.
The Globe points to an excerpt of this video (NSFW for language) showing the arrest.
The video, which was originally uploaded to Facebook on Saturday, starts with an officer using his own phone to record a guy standing in the middle of Washington Street while plainclothes officers investigate something at the Domino's. When the guy yells "Fuck the pigs, my nigga, fuck these nigga bitches, suck my dick, nigga!" to the camera, one of the cops decides to arrest him - on charges of disorderly conduct and blocking traffic.
After he was peacefully handcuffed, a crowd of teens gathers round, he starts resisting getting into the cruiser and screaming about what he wants to do to the cops, the kids start screaming and pushing and a uniformed officer briefly puts his hands on the guy's neck - although without any apparent pressure, and not enough to get him to stop yelling.
The videoer, meanwhile, provides his own commentary. When the cops try to put the traffic blocking guy in a cruiser and he repeats what he wants to do to the police, a crowd of teens starts screaming and pushing and then the videoer starts screaming "Somebody's gonna get shot!" repeatedly even though none of the cops had their guns drawn.
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Comments
Archdale
By Anon
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 3:05pm
is a state funded development, just like West Broadway, Franklin Field, Orient Heights and Fanueil Gardens. One of the bigger issues for these developments is that there is a high concentration of undocumented people living in these developments, since they are not eligible to live in federally funded developments. This brings a host of issues, such as distrust of government officials, weaker voting bases, households with lower incomes due to inability to work above the table...
The reason the place looks like it does is because DHCD barely provides funding for repairs and upkeep. There is little incentive for politicians to lobby for funds in the next budget for capital improvements, forget ever funding redevelopment like at Washington Beech. The closest any of the state-funded developments came to redevelopment was Orient Heights when the casino was a possibility at Suffolk Downs.
BS - "High Concentration" - Illegal Alien?
By anon
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 3:47pm
Outside of Obama's aunt, the dozens of kids i know who grew up in housing projects NONE were "Undocumented" or children of illegal aliens.
BS
By anon
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 4:40pm
Housing projects have maintenance budgets that would make any well-funded condo association green with envy. It's not the lack of funding that's the problem, it's the tenants who routinely destroy their buildings. Put them in any condo building and it will go bankrupt in less than a year regardless of how much money it has.
Proof?
By adamg
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 6:37pm
Can you show some examples of that?
Previous-Anon may be
By anon
Wed, 08/26/2015 - 8:46am
Previous-Anon may be confusing capital improvements funding with maintenance funding. There's a ton of money floating around Dept of Housing for capital improvements, though as with most gov agencies a lot of that gets eaten up in admin, contractors deliberately lowballing and then submitting COs, legitimate COs because the buildings are in way worse condition than anyone expected, etc... plus, it's a big pool, sure, but there's a ton of little housing authorities all over the state, probably more units than anyone really realizes unless you've worked in the field.
Maintenance, on the other hand, tends to be in short supply and most non-Boston housing authorities have one, maybe two guys on staff who jack-of-all-trades all their maintenance issues (which inevitably means the fixes aren't top notch, which eventually leads to more things going bad and thus the issues spiraling into damages that need capital replacement....)
Actually, if there is an
By anon
Wed, 08/26/2015 - 12:18pm
Actually, if there is an "unusually high ratio of children to adults" it leads to housing being "more expensive to maintain". "Teenage vandalism and petty crime is kept in check not just by official law enforcement, but by the presence of adults, so that imbalance created massive problems."
So maybe the answer is more housing throughout the communities of greater Boston. Rather than be concentrated into a single area...
Full content found at
https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/myths-about-publi...
[b]You Need a Balance Among Adults and Kids.[/b]
The other factor that Newman missed in his study is that the two NYCHA complexes he looked at had an unusually high ratio of children to adults. D. Bradford Hunt argues that such concentrations were common in public housing complexes across the nation. Teenage vandalism and petty crime is kept in check not just by official law enforcement, but by the presence of adults, so that imbalance created massive problems.
In Chicago, for example, the decision was made to chiefly cater to large families that had trouble finding housing on the private market. In the Robert Taylor Homes, 80 percent of the units had three to five bedrooms, whereas that figure in earlier complexes had been 32 percent. The result was a population of 20,000 youths to 7,000 adults, a youth density of 2.86. The youth density of all CHA’s holdings was 2.11. Compare that to the baby boom suburb of Park Forest to the south of the city — a planned community specifically created for middle-class families — where the youth density was only 0.97. “In no sizeable residential community in modern history had so many youths been supervised so few adults,†writes Hunt.
Across the nation it was common to find almost two times the number of youths as adults in family public housing complexes (in 1968 the average youth density was 1.94). High youth densities made public housing hard to govern, more expensive to maintain and less appealing places to live. They were also the result of policy decisions, however well intentioned, that were not inevitable. Part of NYCHA’s success is rooted in the fact that their youth densities averaged much closer to those of Park Forest.
Many mnay factors involved in public housing...
By anon
Wed, 08/26/2015 - 5:02pm
Very complex issue.
Other good reading...
There are no children here : the story of two boys growing up in the other America
Author: Alex Kotlowitz
Publisher: New York : Anchor Books, [2011]
Blueprint for disaster : the unraveling of Chicago public housing
Author: D Bradford Hunt
Publisher: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, ©2009.
Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality, and Social Policy
edited by Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Fritz Umbach, Lawrence J. Vale
Key detail
By anon
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 9:35am
You mean knock them down and then rebuild subsidized housing distributed across the regional communities, like Milton, Newton, Brookline and Dedham? Good luck with that.
as seen on TV
By Malcolm Tucker
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 10:54am
Show Me a Hero: Boston edition
These punks are from
By anon
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 9:25am
Archdale are are always causing trouble and selling drugs in the area. I have no issue with the way the cops handled the situation, in fact it scary how little fear criminals have of the law in 2015.
And you know these kids are drug dealers
By adamg
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 9:50am
And not just mouthy kids how?
Kids don't get that mouthy to
By anon
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 10:35am
Kids don't get that mouthy to cops unless they've had enough interaction with police being scofflaws that they aren't afraid of punishment.
What a bunch of ...
By Sock_Puppet
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 9:28am
It's nice to see the professionalism and maturity of Boston's finest on display.
Honestly, if a child is this out of control, DCF should be involved. There's a family in need of services. Mom can whine all she wants about the mean police, but that's a kid who isn't going to make it past his teens without intervention.
that's a kid who isn't going
By chaosjake
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 11:47am
Ta Nehisi Coates had a meditation on this idea in the most recent issue of The Atlantic, phrased as a letter to his young son. It's worth a read, even if you don't usually like his polemics.
And for most of us, mouthing
By Patricia
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 12:33pm
And for most of us, mouthing off to cops would've caused much more trouble at home than at the police station.
My Dad's direction to me:
By issacg
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 3:36pm
My Dad's direction to me: "you ever get stopped by the cops, it's 'yes, sir' or 'no, sir', you got that"? (This from a guy who once had hair down to his ass, and took more than a couple of beatings (not around here) from cops in the very late 60s and 70s).
So yeah, if my Dad had heard that I had been mouthing off to a cop (very little chance - I was not a hell-raiser), I definitely would have been more worried about what I was in for at home than what I might have been in for at the precinct.
Ta Nehisi Coates
By Sock_Puppet
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 5:34pm
Has a mediation about something. But it's not about this.
If he had a meditation about this, it might read more like
There's a lot of bad out there. Racism is part of the bad that's out there. But you attempting to say the problem in this interaction is racism against that idiotic kid is ridiculous. The problem is the kid's behavior, and whoever the failed adults were who raised him.
You really think if he was blue-eyed and blond-haired they'd have treated him any nicer? Would it even be possible to treat him any nicer? If you think you could have gotten away with talking to a cop like that when you were a kid without a trip to the station, you're either delusional or grew up on the big rock candy mountain. That kid's behavior was so aberrant that any reasonable person could agree with the conclusion he was under the influence in a big way and a danger to himself and others.
I didn't watch the video. I'm
By chaosjake
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 8:03pm
I didn't watch the video. I'm reacting to your comment by saying that yes, kids like that end up dead or in jail unless mom or dad gives them the talk.
This is the direct result
By anon
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 9:29am
Of how certain national events were handled by the media and its political arm. Siding with criminals like Mike Brown and vilifying officers is whats lead to this national us vs them mentality.
Us versus them...
By fairlee76
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 2:18pm
While I agree that Mike Brown may not be the ideal test case for the Black Lives Matter movement, it seems to me that the us versus them mentality originated with the police. The current state of affairs is a result of people expressing their displeasure at the "us versus them" style of policing. Radley Balko's "Rise of the Warrior Cop" is a great look at this issue.
In this particular instance, BPD appears to do a great job managing a situation that easily could have escalated. And probably would have had the police been in the "us versus them" mindset so prevalent in American law enforcement in 2015. You ain't in Baghdad anymore, boys. Act like it.
What?!
By anon
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 3:32pm
What?!
Your last paragraph can be summed up as follows: "Great job BPD! Cause you all usually suck! And a departing FU to those of you who served this country".
No...
By fairlee76
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 5:25pm
Last paragraph could be summed up as "according to the literature, there is a growing trend of ex-service men and women joining police forces. Sometimes these men and women treat the general public as they were trained to treat enemy combatants in a combat zone." This is not a criticism of the men and women of the armed forces. It is a criticism of the training they receive when they transition to state side police work.
P.S. - Nowhere did I lump BPD in with other police departments. From what I have seen, BPD does a great job deploying proper force and should be a model for other police departments.
Who's harassing whom?
By Ron Newman
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 10:02am
While the video may be out of context, from what I see here, the crowd and the filmer are harassing the police, not the other way around.
The kid yelling racist and
By anon
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 11:06am
The kid yelling racist and bigoted obscenities is acting out of control and is in a rage -- seems to me like he's on drugs. If I stood in the middle of street yelling the N word, I'd probably be arrested for disturbing the peace as well. This kid needs rehab.
Reaction and question for Adam
By issacg
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 3:32pm
I watched the video without audio. I was surprised, given the body language and gestures of several of the non-police actors, at how calm the cops appeared. I'm pretty sure that I would not have been able to appear so calm if I were one of the cops in that situation (although, maybe with training...). It looked to me like some de-escalation training was put to very good use there.
This is where I usually post my "another bigger incident avoided by demanding that out police have better training, better pay, etc." line. I won't repeat it - our regular users know it well by now.
Lastly, Adam, as I have never been a journalist before, I was wondering whether you debated about reproducing the language of guy who was taunting the cops. Obviously, that's not something that we'd see in the Globe, but I'm not really into pearl clutching, either. I was just curious - particularly in view of the kidlet, etc.
I have to say that too
By anon
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 4:40pm
While I've seen plenty of cops acting terribly (clubbing single, individual people on Bay State Road after the 2008 World Series who were trying to get home, for example, or the ones near my parents hometown who like to refuse police reports because it's too much paperwork) I have to say, most cops I've seen in most cities have behaved very calmly and professionally given that the people they're interacting with are belligerent, on drugs, and/or mentally ill.
The kidlet is old enough to have heard/read those words before
By adamg
Tue, 08/25/2015 - 6:44pm
Ten years ago, maybe, but now? I'm sure she's read worse in some of the novels she's been assigned in class (well, except for those interminable 19th-century British novels she had to read one after the other over the past couple of years), not to mention what she's heard on the T on her way to and from school every day.
As for the cops, definitely: Aside, possibly, from that one moment with the hands on throat (and it's not like that was just some sudden, unprovoked thing), it was interesting just how calm the cops were. A pretty dramatic difference from incidents we keep hearing about elsewhere - as well as that Transit Police incident at Dudley Square.
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