Sitting on a motorcycle while black at Adams and Chelmsford streets in Dorchester

This is classic. Some lunatic goes on a rant in Dorchester and people here end up making it about the police - take away, BPD is racist and god forbid someone try to chime in and support the BPD, then you are "whitesplaining".

But when Adam posts regulary about shootings, murders, or other crime in Boston neighborhoods, you rarely see a SIGLE comment. Everyone is quick to call people racist, but not to look at the issues and offer solutions to problems.

Lazy.

I am glad to see both news reports and anecdotal experience that demonstrates restraint and good situation management and Conflict de escalation by Boston police. Who gives me hope they're my own experience was either an aberration or the end of a bad trend.

In my 20 + years of living here and many more of visiting as a driver, I've been stopped by police about 3 times.

One was mass state police. So, frustrating and uncommunicative, barely anything said just handed me the ticket. But, the Trooper was professional, calm, non-aggressive and kept the whole encounter under control.

The other two were Boston police. White guy, white caps, stabbed in my own neighbourhood. Horrible situations. Officers aggressive and confrontational and belligerent from the moment they jumped out of the car. Very much tending to escalate the situation and create conflict and create resentment. After the second time that happened I came home and told my wife then these guys in general personality would probably be like a lot of Boston campus I know - they didn't have any racial issues that I have noticed. What they did have was such a bad approach to the situation from the start that I would never blame anybody from another ethnic group for thinking that an officer had some sort of a racial issue with them if they were interacting with them like that. It was the type of stuff where I could only just sit through the stuff, give short replies and not escalate. Idiots with badges and guns - so tightly-wound that a traffic stop had them jumpy. Wondered a bit if the city would someday have a shooting tragedy - something avoidable but happens because of bad situational management (doubling down on tragedy if something like a race riot would result from it)

This is what ended in that guys front yard. Unfortunately he lost his shit on the wrong person....the lady who shot this vid had nothing to do with it. https://boston.cbslocal.com/video/3911773-police-a...

Believe it or not, police harassment in Boston is a problem, particularly if you're Black and/or Latino, and even more so if you are also youth.

From an ACLU report:

• 63% of Boston police-civilian encounters from 2007-2010 targeted Blacks, even though Blacks made up less than 25% of the city's population

• Even after controlling for crime, Boston police officers were more likely to initiate police encounters in Black neighborhoods and to initiate encounters with Black people

• Boston police gave essentially no justification for 75% of these encounters, simply listing "investigate person" as the reason

• More than 200,000 encounters led to no arrest, and only 2.5% led to seizure of contraband

Here are two stories from young people at a legislative briefing a few years ago, and a more recent recap about a police brutality demonstration from this April (scroll about 3/4 of the way down for a list of demands).