-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dewayne Hendricks Sent: Saturday, April 20, 2013 10:51 AM To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net Subject: [Dewayne-Net] We gave Tsarnaevs the attention they wanted
We gave Tsarnaevs the attention they wanted The suspects were nobodies who wanted to spread fear. A citywide lockdown and media hysteria helped them do that BY PAUL CAMPOS Apr 20 2013 <http://www.salon.com/2013/04/20/tsarnaevs_got_the_attention_they_wanted/> A major American city was largely shut down for an entire day because of the hunt for someone who, based on initial reports, was quite possibly a confused, apolitical teenager, who may have been cajoled into taking part in what was essentially a bloody publicity stunt by his now-dead older brother. As the Boston Globe reported: Almost 1 million people in metropolitan Boston remained under siege Friday as police conducted a massive manhunt for one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings. The region felt as if it had been gripped by martial law: Police armed with rifles patrolled deserted streets in Boston, Watertown, Cambridge, Waltham, Newton, Belmont, and Brookline, and residents hunkered inside, under authorities' unprecedented order. . Authorities shut down all MBTA service, halting subways, trains, and buses. City and town halls were closed. Public works canceled trash pickup, keeping garbage trucks off streets. Courthouses kept their doors closed. It's always difficult to address the overreaction to certain types of risks, especially the risks posed by violent, politically motivated crime (aka "terrorism"), without sounding potentially callous about the terrible losses suffered by those victimized by such crimes. Nevertheless, this week's spectacle in the Boston area was a testament to the kind of political and media hysteria that, ironically, makes crimes of this sort more likely to happen in the future. What happened in Boston on Monday was indeed terrible, but many terrible things happen in our country every day. For example, Thursday in Chicago, at least eight people, including three teenagers, were shot over a 12-hour period, in seven separate incidents. This is such an ordinary occurrence in that city that you will have to look hard for any mention of these crimes in the local media. (In the national media, the fact that in some of our major cities several people are shot on just about every day of the year is not something that normally warrants any mention. Dog bites man, as they say in the business.) Indeed, that's pretty much an ordinary day in Chicago, but since this carnage isn't being carried out by media-savvy criminals, who combine their addled nihilism with a hunger for publicity, no one pays much attention, let alone shuts down an entire city. It's easy to second-guess law enforcement personnel in a chaotic high-profile situation. In the first few hours after Thursday night's events, some initial overreaction was understandable. Nevertheless, while sealing off the neighborhood in which the suspect was believed to be hiding was certainly reasonable, continuing to maintain an informal lockdown of the whole metropolitan area for an entire day was a much more dubious decision. [snip] Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://www.warpspeed.com/wordpress> _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
