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Police Commisioner Davis admits need for improvement, police oversight

Police Commissioner Davis has not been sitting around on his arse as his detectives, the FBI, and Attorney Donald Stern investigate BPD procedure, potential negligence, civil rights violations or criminal action.

Rather, Davis has been exploring ways to improve policing large crowds in Boston with direct and immediate oversight by human rights lawyers, a technique developed in Northern Ireland.

If Davis has the muster to improve large crowd policing by implementing this new system predicated on having a watchdog function - an outsider with full access and full authority to review and report policing actions with respect to civil rights - then I will take my hat off to the man and suggest he may be one of Boston's best ever.

My next question is: How can citizens of Boston show their support for this initiative because it will surely be met with great resistance from our men in blue? Accountability in the line of duty is a threatening proposition.

Police get Irish tips on crowd policing
Monitoring by rights lawyers, openness urged
By Maria Cramer / August 28, 2008

Read on here in the Globe.

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Comments

I thought we weren't doing that anymore. Although what you're saying may have plenty of merit, how do we know you're not Davis himself using the blog for a PR sham?

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There's only one person behind Anonymous on Universal Hub - he was, alas, clever enough to grab that as a user name before I realized I hadn't set that as a name that nobody could appropriate. If you look back at older posts, you'll notice the truly anonymous comments are from "anon" - I had to change the default setting for such users after Mr. A. grabbed it as a user name.

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That is, someone actually picked that as their login name.

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Thanks for the correction.

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For starters, how in the world did this thread get totally hijacked?

Having read the Glob article on the original topic of this thread with much interest, it sounds like the police are off to a good start, especially by adding police officers who're also EMT's, thus adding more medical equipment for emergencies until a victim reached a hospital, and to monitor human and civil rights enforcement, making sure that the afore-mentioned rights aren't violated. A civilian overseer would also be helpful for the latter.

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For starters Dan Farnkoff, who is usually quite astute, got thrown by my pseudonym. I'm glad to see you focused on the substance of the article.

Yes! This is a great development. I wonder why Davis wants to back off the accountability of having the human rights lawyers make their reports public. It seems to me that this approach will work only if it can't be covered up when rights are breached.

When Davis first reported David Woodmen's death, I thought he was worse than useless. He repeated the party line shamelessly without a hint of skepticism and left the investigation in the hands of BPD detectives, a recipe for compromised results.

Davis' oversight review initiative by Attorney Donald Stern was limited to examining police procedure not the events of that night or culpability. The FBI's interest in reviewing civil rights violations is conducted only after BPD detectives are done.

BPD detectives' work is cut out for them in the Woodman's case. Nine police left the line of duty that night to report for stress treatment, immediately on the heels of this incident. The thin blue line is notoriously resistant to frank and open testimony about how a fellow policeman conducted his business...

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