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View Full Version : The Day the Music Died for Good (Or, Mandatory Donuts - Re: Boston)




sailingaway
04-22-2013, 09:57 PM
I'm assuming they paid for the donuts unless they were offered them for free voluntarily. I also think Dunkin Donuts wasn't intimidated by the police, and I think that sort of acrimony mars the article, but it still makes some excellent points. In part:


While the people of Watertown and the rest of Boston might have been celebrating a "victory" by police, what they and the flock of journalists descending upon the story failed to see was that their lives have changed for the worst, and it was not the Brothers Tsarnaev that changed things. It was government and more specifically, how government agencies handled the hunt for Dzhokar, the younger of the two.

After authorities had gained enough knowledge of who the bombers might be, having scanned the thousands of photos and videos of the blast scenes, the next step was finding the two brothers. In retrospect, one should not be surprised that the two were quickly identified.

Like all big road race events, photos of the finish line and the surrounding area are continuously taken. One reason goes back to 1980, when an interloper named Rosie Ruiz snuck into the race a half-mile from the finish and claimed victory. She received the laurel wreath in a public ceremony, but later that week race officials had enough evidence to find Ruiz was a fraud, and French Canadian Jaqueline Gareau was named the women’s champion.

Until the bombing, the Ruiz affair was the worst thing associated with the nation’s oldest and best-known marathon but Ruiz’s fraud led to race organizers setting up an extensive video system to ensure that nothing like that ever happened again, with the finish area being the most extensively recorded. And it is not just the professionals doing the video work. Organizations and individuals have literally hundreds of video cameras and video recording devices working throughout the race, and especially at the finish, and it was inevitable that whoever was responsible would have been caught on camera, and they were.

By Thursday night, police knew the suspects and in a firefight in Watertown, the older brother, Tamerlan, was killed. Dzhokar escaped and the manhunt became even more intense.

Until that time, the investigation really was about simple police work, a meticulous effort in which both police and ordinary citizens, including at least one seriously injured in the blast, were able to piece things together. (Unfortunately, the New York Post, which distinguished itself by headlining error after egregious error, committed a journalistic outrage by showing a photo of two local North African high school runners and all-but-claiming they were the bombers.)

When Dzhokar escaped, a police era passed with him and things fell into an abyss from there. First, hundreds of paramilitary police occupied the streets of Boston and surrounding areas, showing off their military equipment and looking every bit the role of the conquering army that one might expect to see in a bad movie.

For all the show of force, this had nothing to do either with finding and apprehending the suspect or "protecting" the citizens of Boston. Instead, they acted as government enforcers of Patrick’s "shelter in place" order for the city and surrounding areas, an order that effectively imposed martial law. These paramilitary "protectors" were not there to apprehend a dangerous suspect; they were there to intimidate the local citizenry into staying in their houses and apartments even though their going to work would have had no interference whatsoever with the police search.

As one blogger put it:

The government and police were willing to shut down parts of the economy like the universities, software, biotech, and manufacturing…but when asked to do an actual risk to reward calculation where a small part of the costs landed on their own shoulders, they had no problem weighing one versus the other and then telling the donut servers "yeah, come to work – no one's going to get shot."

Yes, the police allowed Dunkin’ Donuts to stay open. In fact, the cops ordered the business to be open in order to serve the police (who I am sure did not pay for their coffee and treats), even to the point of enforcing police stereotypes regarding donuts. That others would have real costs thrown upon their shoulders in order to serve the whim of police and to make a political animal like Deval Patrick look like a "take charge" guy is of no consequence to those that make a living ordering around others. The people meekly followed orders because they knew the paramilitary cops would have gunned them down and faced no legal consequences for enforcing martial law.

It got worse, and I would say hilariously worse because the show-of-force tactics, martial law, and the eternal press conferences featuring Patrick and other Very Serious People actually ensured it would take longer to find Dzhokar. Police, in typical bureaucratic fashion, had created a perimeter in Watertown and they searched everywhere within that area.

If one looks at the picture of the boat in which Dzhokar was found hiding, one can see it is just behind the house, not even 20 feet away. However, while the house fell within the perimeter, the boat did not, and it never occurred to the police to look at what in retrospect would have been an excellent hiding place. The bureaucratic paramilitary cops, however, did not even think of walking an inch past their perimeter line.

It took the owner of the boat who noticed something amiss – after he was permitted to leave his house when Patrick lifted his "shelter" order – to find the wounded Tsarnaev, and police flushed him out about a half-hour later. In other words, despite the show of force and despite the presence of paramilitary cops, armored trucks, and assault rifles, the suspect was captured because a mere mundane was willing to look 20 feet beyond where the cops would go.



more: http://lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson364.html

the point that where they didn't bear the cost they shut the city down, but where it impacted them, they let / made, whatever, a donut shop stay open, is a pretty major tell about how overreaching shutting down the city was. And that it took a civilian to find the suspect is also telling that with all the excess of force, it can't be perfect, and citizens can do valuable work, when let free.

DGambler
04-22-2013, 10:52 PM
Also, didn't the civilian who found him step out for a smoke?