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So what have we learned from the Boston bombing?
That anyone attempting an act of terror has a lot of time to fade into nowhere. That shitty video surveillance tapes and random pictures, taken by bystanders, are often the only lead, and altering one's identity can completely sidetrack the investigation. We can only imagine what would have happened if suspects used wigs, fake beards and face-altering makeup.
Did the police do well? Everyone is applauding right now, but did they? How did they locate those 2 idiots?
Oh, the suspects robbed a store, killed a cop, carjacked.
After all that they had a classic shootout resulting in one of them getting away while driving the same vehicle they've carjacked earlier, and then the whole town needed to be shut down! A wounded 19-year-old kid was able to run off and stay at large for another day. The excuse is - "It was dark". Really? It's well-fucking-lit imo.
How did they find the guy after that? Someone came home and checked his boat seeing blood on it. It takes another few hours of live coverage with helicopters, armored vehicles and an army of snipers before they recover the semi-alive corpse.
Can we call this a success? An investigation that panned out solely thanks to suspects being complete idiots and some lucky tips from locals? Where was the part that was solved by police? The photos that were released by FBI were so shitty that suspect's own classmates couldn't recognize him there.
This "manhunt" was sickening. If this is what it takes to catch 2 idiots that were all over the tape - I am worried for us once we get in real trouble.
  
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I pretty well agree with the general sentiment.
Those high speed chases you see, as soon as the suspect leaves the vehicle on foot at night, there's a chopper with spotlight (and often times infra-red) tracking them, and that's been standard for ~10 years. This guy is so much more dangerous / so many more resources were committed to finding him but he wasn't followed in this manner?
I want to put it down to it being a police thing and a more serious threat would be handled more / entirely by the FBI or Homeland or something, but I really dont know...
Edit: Alryk makes good points too though.
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That's one way of looking at it.
On the other hand, the police (and government) managed to, in five days, mobilize nearly every state law enforcement personnel, along with the FBI and Swat teams (is swat state managed?) to track down a single person who disappeared quickly into the chaos of the explosions. Then, they managed to track down and pursue 2 people out of over half a million using the "random pictures taken by bystanders" who by the way wouldnt have been looking for or focusing on the suspect, making him grainy in most pictures. The police aren't going to be taking random pictures of people anyways.
Note that 1) they did it even with the potential of all those things you mentioned, and 2) the fact that they did do it at all is impressive. And your facts aren't completely right afaik. Somebody else robbed a store that they were carjacking from. They didn't use the mercedes they had forever - they stole the car with the owner inside, and later abandoned it with the owner.
Another few hours of live coverage - there was a shootout before that when the place was surrounded. The goal is to capture the guy alive - if they wanted him dead it wouldn't have taken a "few hours." You can't just move in on the boat. With the cover on, there is no way of knowing if he has additional explosives or any ammo left (although he ultimately didn't).
They systematically chased the guy into a corner effectively. You can say they got lucky, but why was the kid hiding out in a random boat in the first place? He had nowhere else to go. The lockdown makes it much easier to find a single person fleeing around the streets, and it also allows them to search houses as needed.
You make it seem like there are a lot of idiotic things the police did, when in reality the fact that they needed him alive makes it infinitely harder than it otherwise would be to take the kid. You really think that the FBI/Swat/all of massachusett's police couldn't kill the kid if they REALLY wanted him dead? They had him surrounded for hours because they didn't want to explode the boat, get him killed, or anything that would prevent him from being taken into custody.
The part solved by police? The bombs found in Cambridge, Jefferson Library, and several other places. Oh, and they did this with zero civilian casualties outside of the bombing. They could have gone wildly into every firefight possible, but they didn't. The systematic method and "slowness" or however you seem to want to put it of them tracking this kid down prevented civilians from getting hurt, other bombs from going off, the kid from needlessly dying, and allows us to actually put him on trial and figure out how he's so messed up.
I guess it's two sides of the same thing though. Meh.
Edit: imagine trying to catch a wounded tiger ALIVE in a jungle of 650,000 other tigers. without letting that tiger kill any more monkeys. (What do tigers actually eat? Haha)
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On April 20 2013 16:18 Alryk wrote:
Edit: imagine trying to catch a wounded tiger ALIVE in a jungle of 650,000 other tigers. without letting that tiger kill any more monkeys. (What do tigers actually eat? Haha)
I would've thought with current technology it'd be significantly easier than finding a tiger in a jungle. Just shows law enforcement is WAY behind the way it is portrayed in TV/movies.
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Just makes you think what will happen next time with a group of war veterans instead of amateur kids.
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This is why shows like CSI and even my beloved Castle have completely divorced the perception of how police work happens with the reality of how it actually happens. Hell, even the original shows (Quincy, Cagney & Lacey, Hawaii Five Oh, fuck, Dragnet) weren't ever realistic. Police procedurals have never matched reality. (Reality doesn't get ratings.)
This entire affair was an amazing effort. Just the level of cooperation between so many federal, state, and local agencies is unbefuckinglievable and should be commended.
To answer a question, SWAT teams are managed at the level of their existence - If Mass State Police have a SWAT team, they manage it. If BPD has a SWAT team, they manage it. If the county sheriff (they do exist, sometimes, in the Northeast) has one, he manages it. It's a departmental/organizational thing.
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Yeah.
It's a good thing for us that acts of terror are usually associated with tribalism of some kind, and when innocent people are killed in the name of a cause, there's usually a group enthusiastically taking credit for it.
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United States22883 Posts
Perhaps you should stop watching CSI and NCIS, in order to further prevent not knowing what the fuck you're talking about.
All investigations require assistance from the community in which they take place. This is not a separate, independent entity that just works while avoiding contact with the rest of society. The work they do depends on inputs from society. Furthermore, they were picking two people out of a crowd of 500,000.
It seems like this attack has brought out the best of the BPD, and the stupidest of TL. What I've learned is that shitty posters with half a dozen bans usually return as shitty posters.
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You also have to consider the other options.
Massive databanks (fingerprints, DNA, images, ...) for every citizen. Or even better - implant a chip in everyone and track his movement. Surely that would speed up investigations, but do we really want that?
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I think you make a good point though, what if they had a disguise? What if they didn't carjack anyone or rob a store, but just took a train to another city? It just seems like the cops were lucky in this case, I think if the suspects were more careful this probably would have been a five year investigation trying to find out who they were, and where they were. By that time they probably could have been in another country.
I still think you underestimate the amount of work required to ensure these two are the people you're interested in. There were lots of false-positives, and they certainly did a good job ensuring other bombs didn't go off. In the end they worked really fast, so on the whole I think they did a pretty good job. But I wonder what it would be like if they were even slightly more careful about not being identified, or not making it easy to find out where they could be.
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Something I find odd (and I don't the details, which is why I want to know) is that on evening of the final day, after the tip came in about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev being inside the boat, law enforcement used a FLIR camera to confirm that there was a person inside the boat. A FLIR camera can see body heat, and is not affected by darkness. If this is the case, how did Tsarnaev manage to escape in the early morning of the first day? Was there no helicopter present? Did the police have no dogs on the scene? And if the suspect was bleeding from the gun fight, wouldn't the suspect also leave a trail of blood that could be tracked by dogs or even flashlights?
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On April 21 2013 00:16 radscorpion9 wrote:
I think you make a good point though, what if they had a disguise? What if they didn't carjack anyone or rob a store, but just took a train to another city? It just seems like the cops were lucky in this case, I think if the suspects were more careful this probably would have been a five year investigation trying to find out who they were, and where they were. By that time they probably could have been in another country.
I still think you underestimate the amount of work required to ensure these two are the people you're interested in. There were lots of false-positives, and they certainly did a good job ensuring other bombs didn't go off. In the end they worked really fast, so on the whole I think they did a pretty good job. But I wonder what it would be like if they were even slightly more careful about not being identified, or not making it easy to find out where they could be.
Actually, incidentally, John Allen Mohammed robbed a gas station, and bragged about it in one of the notes left for police. Timothy McVeigh got arrested for driving a vehicle with no license plates. Ted Kaczynski actually published an essay where he used phrases that he was known for using frequently in his personal life which led to his brother being able to identify him as the Unibomber.
I don't know, it seems like we constantly have these incredibly lucky captures due to very easily-avoidable mistakes by the perpetrators. What if they don't mess up next time?
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United States22883 Posts
On April 21 2013 01:35 ninazerg wrote:
Something I find odd (and I don't the details, which is why I want to know) is that on evening of the final day, after the tip came in about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev being inside the boat, law enforcement used a FLIR camera to confirm that there was a person inside the boat. A FLIR camera can see body heat, and is not affected by darkness. If this is the case, how did Tsarnaev manage to escape in the early morning of the first day? Was there no helicopter present? Did the police have no dogs on the scene? And if the suspect was bleeding from the gun fight, wouldn't the suspect also leave a trail of blood that could be tracked by dogs or even flashlights?
He got away in a car and there wasn't a helicopter present because it was an unexpected encounter. I believe he was also leaving explosive devices around to stop them from pursuing.
And yes, if criminals behave flawlessly, they won't be caught. You're not going to catch them if they don't make mistakes. That's just reality. People have stupid expectations based on television.
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I learned that OP is delusional and irrational.
Of course shitty video and random pictures taken by accident are going to be the only lead. What do you expect? All it takes is a tip or two based on these shitty leads to really get something going. Its hard to live a completely isolated life. And as people mentioned before, if someone really tried hard enough and smartly enough to isolate themselves, they probably could get away with something like Boston (at the cost of not living a normal life). The thing is, people who are clever enough to get away with it are usually smart enough to use that cleverness in a more productive way. Another reason you don't see many get away with crimes like this is the perps usually want to take credit. I think that's what the carjacking was about, they wanted to be able to tell someone they were the bombers. They wanted to be infamous.
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Wow, imagine that, the only evidence for a crime is eye witness accounts, security footage and phone pictures that clearly identify a suspect. Golly, the police are really dragging their feet. Why did it take so long to bring in the psychics, fortune tellers and Sherlock Holmes?
Is the OP completely delusional? If he thinks this is a failure of an investigation, what the hell does he think actual criminal cases involve? Minute DNA evidence that can magically be checked against every single person in the world? CCTV cameras with a fancy enhance button (and even a 360 rotate if you spring for it)?
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1/5. There's a reason they had the FBI number onscreen on CNN and the NY/NJ port authority has annoying daily ads about reporting suspicious behavior/bags on public transportation. Its because it works.
Frank Abagnale, an astronomically intelligent con man, was finally caught by a flight attendant who saw him passing by in France. Charles Starkweather, serial killer, was ratted out by his girlfriend. Eventually someone that knows the suspect will be able to at least give the right direction to the police on his trail. You can't expect the police to do all the work of finding who he is.
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On April 21 2013 01:49 Jibba wrote:Show nested quote +On April 21 2013 01:35 ninazerg wrote:
Something I find odd (and I don't the details, which is why I want to know) is that on evening of the final day, after the tip came in about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev being inside the boat, law enforcement used a FLIR camera to confirm that there was a person inside the boat. A FLIR camera can see body heat, and is not affected by darkness. If this is the case, how did Tsarnaev manage to escape in the early morning of the first day? Was there no helicopter present? Did the police have no dogs on the scene? And if the suspect was bleeding from the gun fight, wouldn't the suspect also leave a trail of blood that could be tracked by dogs or even flashlights? He got away in a car and there wasn't a helicopter present because it was an unexpected encounter. I believe he was also leaving explosive devices around to stop them from pursuing. And yes, if criminals behave flawlessly, they won't be caught. You're not going to catch them if they don't make mistakes. That's just reality. People have stupid expectations based on television.
From the reports yesterday, I was under the impression that he escaped on foot, but know now that this is not the case. As far as "People have stupid expectations based on television." goes, I don't watch television, but I know there are plenty of movies and shows where 'the bad guys' escape.
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You're an idiot of such incredible stature.
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wasnt the store robbery not committed by them but purely coincidental?
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EPT
