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Little kid watches parents held up at gunpoint in East Boston
By adamg on Sat, 09/05/2009 - 4:22pm
District A-7 reports a couple and their five-year-old daughter were walking into their Falcon Street home around 9:45 p.m. on Wednesday when two guys came up to them, took out guns and demanded money. One of the gunmen pointed his weapon at the husband, the other pointed his gun at the wife and daughter.
Both supsects are described as Hispanic males of medium height. One was 15, the other 24 to 26. Both wore black baseball hats and black clothes.
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Comments
Not just the kid's perspective
Think of how the parents probably felt, having a gun pointed at their kid.
What the hell is wrong with
What the hell is wrong with people. Anyone who is disgusting enough to hold a child at gunpoint should just be thrown off the Tobin with cement sneakers on.
Glad you agree with me
This is why we need public executions. The French got it right. Guillotine these pieces of shit in front of everybody in Faneuil Hall. Hell, let the parents drop the blades.
Oh, I don't necessarily
I just think that anybody who would pull a gun on a five year old is beyond redemption and has no ethics whatsoever, nor the potential for any.
I'm alarmed too
Hyperbole aside, I think that someone who would pull a gun on a five year-old is *not* necessarily beyond redemption.
And I'm speaking hypothetically: we don't know for certain whether the alleged assailants in this case actually pulled a gun on a five year-old, since witness accounts are often unreliable, and reports can get garbled.
That's the last I intend to comment on UH. Boston proper has too many big-city problems and small-town dysfunctions. My own little not-Boston-proper town has its own problems, but those problems seem much more tractable, and I'm not a kibitzing outsider there. Let's just be friends, and we can still visit each other's parks and restaurants sometimes.
Indeed, my comments are
Indeed, my comments are openly quite often hyperbolic compared to my rational thoughts IRL :)
As the occasional UH commenter, from my perspective your thoughts will be missed!
Faneuil Hall is a restaurant district!
Don't you think your proposal might be bad for the businesses there?
Not at all
ATTENTION BOSTON!
Witness a live execution from (blank) restaurant! All you can eat buffet, 2 drink tickets, and watch a criminal get his head chopped off for only $50!
That would sell out in 30 minutes. I'd have three phones going myself to ensure that I got through.
Go live in Afganistan then
They even require everybody, including small children, to show up and watch.
Will's Taliban Heaven? Oh yeah.
Wow
Between you and Eeka, this must be Miss the Point Day at UH. I said that people would VOLUNTARILY attend executions. Then you go off on a rant about mandatory attendance at executions in Afghanistan. What the fuck does that have to do with my point?
This neighborhood has gone to shit!
I used to be proud to say I was from East Boston. Now when someone asked me where i'm from I really don't want to tell them.
There used to be a time when this city used to be safe and people where friendly, Now it is filled with theives,junkies and gang members. It is far from a good place to live anymore and surely not a safe place to raise a family.
Maybe it is time for the people who were born and raised here and the small percentage of decent people who live here to take to the streets and claim their city back.
Maybe someday people can be proud to say I'm from eastie!!
That is what it takes, right?
Well you know what, believe it or not, that is probably exactly what it takes to reclaim the place. You create a citizen-police partnership group. The key members of the group can be thought of as the "anchor households" on each street. Responsible citizens. They all get to know each other at meetings, and do a "phone tree" calling whenever something seems amiss. When you see something, you don't just call the cops, you call the households around you, who call the households around them. Someone looks out the window and says "I DO see a BMW driving away from that direction, let me write down the license plate".
The cops can then build a positive relationship with these key players in the neighborhoods, and this "web of eyes" acts to route out the crime. Someone knows where these gangsters live, park their cars, etc, and that info comes out through the phone-tree mechanism.
Think that would help? Want to set it up? Get the ball rolling?
Also a great way to build community and get to know your (good) neighbors?
Act before it gets even worse..
While I like the guillotine suggestion, a far more practical solution would be to stop importing poverty and crime into our neighborhood through immigration reform and active enforcement of existing immigration laws. We can keep our heads in the sand and pretend that there is no link between immigration and crime in East Boston or we can do something about it. I recommend checking out www.numbersusa.com for some interesting data.
or we could work on...
fixing poverty and crime in america by active reform. we could work on our schools, our social services, our mental health services, and we could have better gun control.
or you can continue to blame the foreigners and put your head in the sand about the fact that *most* crime in the US is committed by legal citizens of the US, who were born here and who will die here.
I wasn’t talking about
I wasn’t talking about “most crime in the US” – I was talking specifically about crime in East Boston. Have you ever read the arrest report in the local paper? I’ll bet at least 70% of those arrested in Eastie are either here illegally or our descendents of immigrants who were here illegally. Of course we’ll never be able to confirm this data, since the BPD cannot/does not confirm the immigration status of those placed under arrest. I agree that reform is needed in all of areas you mentioned, but why not start by enforcing existing laws? Also, how do you propose we “fix” poverty in America while we continue to allow some of the lowest rungs of global economic status to freely immigrate to the US?
www.numbersusa.com
You were a low rung once too
or one of your ancestors was. That's true for almost everyone here.
I agree completely. Only
I agree completely. Only when my ancestors immigrated here, they moved to assimilate as quickly as possible, the social services available to immigrants were far fewer (virtually non-existent) and less costly than what is available today and, even so, there was a stigma to being “on the dole.” Sadly, this not the case today and many immigrants realize that living in abject poverty in the US, with its abundance of social services and safety nets, is far better than living in the poverty of their native countries.
Your ancestors
Let's not gloss over what life was like for immigrants in the last century.
It sucked. Many lived in squalid slums with rampant crime and disease. Look up "settlement houses" sometime. And while their children assimilated quickly, I'm not sure they did quite the same. They formed little self-help and burial organizations based on their home towns in the old country. The feasts in the North End are a remnant of this; as are the several dozen tiny Jewish cemeteries in West Roxbury.
Organized Crime
Yes, those wonderful immigrants of yesteryear and their rapid assimilation ... by criminal elements.
How else to explain how every substantial immigrant group seemed to grow it's own mobster infestation? From the Jewish mobs of Detroit to the Mafia to the Winter Hill Gang to the Tongs of the West Coast cities to the romantacized Latino gangs of West Side Story to the gangstas of modern ill-repute.
Most immigrants are and were hard working people. Many of yesteryear didn't have much dealings with the local shadow goverment of crime ... but they didn't snitch about what they saw either.
We have marginalization by the existing society to thank for much of it, too. Why is it that demands for assimilation are always accompanyied by demands to resist assimilating immigrants? This is what leads to power vacuums and organized crime rule in marginalized neighborhoods.