There wasn’t a single super bowl-related arrest in Boston Sunday night, according to a Feb. 5 CBS report. Not a single one. Not one imbibed, self-loathing fan stuffed into the back of a cruiser. That’s impressive – it’s just a shame City Hall and university heads had to use scare tactics and over-zealous precautions to pull it off. Talk about adding insult to injury.
Let’s run down the list: A parking ban on 42 streets, 2,000 staffed police officers, national guard reinforcements, riot gear, a press conference, steel barricades around Fenway Park, wooden barricades seemingly everywhere, the list goes on. At Northeastern, there was the e mail “reminding” but actually bluntly threatening students to stay inside, a convoy running down Huntington Avenue just before the game, complete with a sheriff’s wagon and a National Guard humvee (equipped with a gun turret), and hundreds of riot gear-laden cops standing in rank and file all over campus.
The police’s plan was to “confine the celebration to the smallest possible area,” according to a Feb 3. Boston Globe article. Had there been reason to celebrate, it seemed like the celebrating would have been non-existent. Since there wasn’t, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis was right in saying “Lose? No problem. Everybody puts their head down and goes home.” That’s how it panned out at Northeastern at least.
It didn’t work out that way at UMass-Amherst. After the Patriots lost, 1,500 students rushed the university’s Southwest Quad, all the while throwing toilet paper rolls, beer cans and setting off small fireworks. Fifteen minutes later, the police broke the riot up with smoke bombs, pepper balls and horseback officers – 13 students were arrested, according to the Daily Collegian, UMass-Amherst’s student paper. Had UMass-Amherst’s Southwest Quad been filled with police throughout the game, much like ours were, it’s likely the riot wouldn’t have happened.
From a cautionary, mature perspective, it seems City Hall’s plan worked and Boston has good reasons for the security measures: Over the past decade, three people have died in sports riots and countless others have been injured. There could just be too many colleges in the area for celebrations to not boil over. Given this year’s success, the upped security will likely become the norm for big games from now on.
From a student perspective, this is another item on the list of measures City Hall and Northeastern have taken to curb rowdy, collegiate behavior. Maybe the crackdown on off campus offenses, Mission Hill, liquor laws and sports riots are all part of a grand effort to make Boston less fun than Amherst. If so, there’s a lot of work to be done, but they’re on the right track.
