By Glenn Yoder
When Boston Police Comm-issioner Kathleen O’Toole stepped behind the podium Thursday to issue her thoughts on the report of the Feb. 1 Super Bowl riots, she said she intended to make her message clear: both the police and universities are to blame for what occurred.
“My message to the community is that the Boston Police Department failed in this instance and we’re very sorry for that, and that is a horrible tragedy, but we need to share responsibility with our communities,” she said.
She said she was aware Mayor Thomas M. Menino had already established communication with Northeastern by meeting with President Richard Freeland, and the Boston Police Department intends to meet with him as well.
“There wasn’t a lot of coordination that went on in advance of the events that evening,” O’Toole said. “It is shared responsibility. The Boston Police Department cannot do this alone.”
O’Toole, who took office a week after the riots, said the on-duty officers are not to blame for the poorly-handled situation, but rather those in charge of the preparations.
“The findings of the review state that the men and women of the Boston Police Department who performed on the front lines on Super Bowl night performed in an exceptionally professional manner, using great restraint,” she said.
Instead, she said it was the management team that failed the officers by not anticipating either the extent or the behavior of the crowds.
“The department has to be better prepared to react to sporting-event related disturbances, particularly in a city that has such a large population of college students,” she said.
O’Toole said the night was probably the department’s “worst tragedy” and listed a variety of errors that the department made including the low deployment of officers, the incident commander not being accessible and the lack of strong police presence in several areas.
“I think it’s bold of the police to step up and say that,” said Mark Soucy, a junior respiratory therapy major. “I’d like to see [Freeland] make some sort of public announcement just to say not to put the blame on students directly, and that Northeastern students shouldn’t be blamed totally. He should defend us as a student body.”
Students angered over the canceled Ludacris concert that was to be the finale of next month’s Springfest are infuriated now that they have endured the punishment for an event the police have taken partial credit for.
“It was definitely unfair,” said Taylor Gough, a junior nursing major. “Freeland should look to do something to make it up to us since that was our big year-end hoopla.”
The report O’Toole reviewed was prepared by the Superintendent of the Bureau of Internal Investigations, Thomas A. Dowd, who was present at the press conference along with the recently appointed Superint-endent James Claiborne, chief of the bureau of field services. Claiborne estimated a total of 138 police officers were deployed throughout the city Super Bowl night. He said he would have “at least doubled that.”
But even with the additional police, he said it is the universities’ responsibility to control their students through suspensions and expulsions.
“Not to beat on the universities, but communities have had their challenges with students for a long time and, to tell you the truth, the only sanction that really has an effect on students is throwing them out of school and suspending them,” Claiborne said. “We used to lock up hundreds of kids on a weekend and throwing them in Roxbury District Court and Brighton District Court was simply a badge of honor. But, when you send a note home to Dad saying, ‘You just wasted $30,000,’ that kid’s going to learn next time and the threat of that keeps him in line.”
Claiborne, who for seven years was the commanding officer in District 4, which contains Brighton, Boston University and many other colleges, proposed a different idea to controlling the crowds for the next time a riot occurs.
He said other universities should follow the lead of BU and have community affairs officers ride along with police officers, in hopes that students would be intimidated by those they recognize.
“My hope is that next time the Patriots clench it again, which I hope is next January, I’d like to see someone from the office of community affairs or maybe from the dean’s office out on the street so the university and police are kind of both sending the same message,” Claiborne said.
