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Lawyer for downtown bar accuses TV reality show of inciting near riot
By adamg on Tue, 10/08/2013 - 11:47am
The Stadium Sports Bar and Grill, 148 State St., had to answer today to a series of police complaints about alleged fights and overcrowding on four separate occasions in June and July.
At a Boston Licensing Board hearing, its lawyer played the usual downtown-bar gambit - that any problems on State Street at closing were not its fault but the fault of other nearby bars.
But for one of the incidents, a large unruly crowd early on July 5, he made another argument: The crowd was not at all that bad until a group of BPD Youth Violence Strike Force detectives arrived with a camera crew from Donnie Wahlberg's "Boston Finest" reality show.
"The crowd appears to have become excited by the fact that 'Boston's Finest' was being filmed," he said, adding many of the people outside recognized the detectives from their appearances on last season's episodes of the show. He said that Stadium security staff wouldn't let the video crew inside the bar, and that the strike-force detectives went inside and were very friendly with patrons, even to the point of high-fiving them.
But then one patron got unruly and was ejected - with police help. When the detectives exited with him, the camera crew picked up their cameras, turned them on and the crowd was set off, he said.
Det. Arthur Brewster, who is not a member of the strike force, painted a different picture. He said detectives heard that a large number of gang members were congregating that night at the bar and that the crowd had gotten so out of hand that District A-1 officers were overwhelmed and that officers from other districts across the city had to be called in to disperse the crowd.
The board, whose chairwoman Nicole Murati Ferrer accused a former employee of lying to police about another incident, decides Thursday what action, if any, to take about the incidents.
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Comments
Just Boston being Boston.
Just Boston being Boston.
Stadium is the worst
can't wait for this place to be shut down. the guy who owns it is a snake and all the bouncers are sketchy. it attracts the worst kind of people and there's a problem there every single night.
adios stadium
Affiliated with "The Stadium" in South Boston?
Is this an outpost of the other place called The Stadium, or did it move from South Boston to the Financial District? Seems like they're quite similar, in that they both suck.
The one in Southie is still
The one in Southie is still there and has its own problems. There's also one in Quincy.
Thanks..didn't know that
and one of those places is already one too many.
Need "filming" in the headline
A more common situation would be a reality show on a bar's TV than filming in one. I first thought the story might be patrons arguing over who should get exiled from the house or island, even though watching paint dry is more interesting.
Ah yes, time for another journey
Through the minefield of bull(expletive.)
1) A patron was removed "with police help?" Come the (expletive) on. Police fail. The bar employees can police their own private property, thank you very much. Unless you were called upon, you're there as private citizens.
2) Did the camera crew defy the bar employee's order not to film in the bar, or did they follow the detectives and removed patron outside and start filming?
3) "The crowd was set off?" Well, on a scale of "yelling drunk guy" to "Watts in 1992," what was the level of ruckus?
4) Detective Brewster, what's your point when you say "officers from other districts had to respond?" I see this nonsense come up in board stories on UH all the time. Once is a fluke, twice is a trend, three times is a problem. When was the last time a review was conducted of station staffing and officer placement in Boston, and is the current geography of staffing efficient for 2013 Boston?
5) Ferrer, what proof do you have that a former Stadium employee "lied to police about another incident?" Give me some or resign, because that's a grossly improper thing for a public official to say. You're a lawyer, for Chrissakes. You know better. Go into a courtroom and call an opposing witness a "liar" and tell me what the response is.
Some answers
1) The Youth Strike Force detectives showed up because they heard a lot of gangbangers were in attendance. Who better to ask for help in removing an unruly patron than some cops?
2) The camera crew did not go in the bar, but turned the cameras on when they saw the detectives coming out of the bar.
3) Dunno.
4) Each district has a certain level of staffing - along with a couple of officers assigned to "emergency deployment team" duty in other districts should that district suddenly need more help. You typically see EDTs called in for large crime scenes, a murder or shooting in the street, for example, where all of a district's officers are assigned to that crime scene and EDT officers from other districts are called in to handle other calls. Now, most nights, the bars close without much incident (in addition to detail cops hired by individual bars, some areas, such as the Theater District, have extra officers on patrol, paid for by the clubs), but every so often, things get out of hand and the EDT system is activated.
5) I admit it, at this point, I wasn't paying as close attention as I should, since I was writing up my notes on the House of Blues. However, the context was that the Stadium lawyer was asking for leniency because since the incident in question, the bar has fired lots of workers and has a new security manager and, sheesh, go easy on these new folks, and Ferrer responded by basically saying not so fast, when an employee of the bar lies, etc. ... In court, I suspect she could testify in much greater detail since, unlike me, she was not trying to do two things at once.
I keep hearing bad things about their bars
They want to open one in my neighborhood. Should I be concerned? I am, a little bit. Not only is it not my style of bar, but they don't seem to attract the best of crowds...
Needed something for the cameras?
Did the policemen inviting their friends with the cameras help or hinder keeping the peace? Having on-duty police involved in a "reality show" is morally suspect.