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'We need to do better,' BAA says after meeting with Black Marathon spectators who say they were bottled up by police in Newton
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What’s the solution?
I was there….this group was shooting confetti out of cannons and, reportedly, running onto the course.
There are indications that they were told to stop on numerous occasions.
It simply isn’t true, as some have intimated, that this kind of course incursion is commonplace at the marathon but that it’s just permitted elsewhere.
What should the police have done?
What should the police have
What should the police have done?
Nothing.
We are just a few years away from that. The BAA called them THREE times, the police finally responded, everyone flipped out.
Police should have done nothing. And in a few years we will all regret that the safest, best course of action for police to take, is to do nothing.
"indications"
I'm not disagreeing with anything you stated – I don't have any info – but do you have any kind of supporting source, beyond "many people are saying..."?
were you there?
because i see "reportedly" and "indications of" .. but ... were you there?
Yes, I was there.
I am trying to be really careful in my phrasing to not mischaracterize what I witnessed vs. what I heard only via hearsay.
I heard and saw the cannon being fired into the running lane. It is quite clear from numerous reports that members of this group were actually going into the street, too. (I think they've admitted to that.)
I did not witness the police ask this group to stop its interference with the race, but I'm inclined to believe those that have reported that such requests were made first. Reportedly, there were three calls to the police, which were made at the BAA's behest.
I cannot speak to the (reportedly) injured parties' faithfulness in their retelling of events, but I will say that the narrative circulating more widely in some arenas, to the effect of boiling this down to a simple case of good-old-boy Bull Connor-esq Newton cops peremptorily escalating seems both untrue and pernicious - especially because it tends to entirely elide the plain facts of what this group was doing in the streets in favor of falling back on "You know, it's Boston (Karen this, Karen that)..." kinds of retorts.
They didn't JUST admit to going into the street...
They livestreamed multiple instances of groups going into the street (and blasting the confetti cannons) on numerous Instagram stories proudly shared on their groups' official accounts, videos and screenshots of which have been reshared on other sites.
Regardless of any supportive intention behind it, or if individuals or smaller groups were able to get away with similar isolated incidents elsewhere on the course, it's obviously disruptive to the race and against the rules, they were asked several times to stop, and the videotaped eventual police response seems to be extraordinarily patient and passive.
Twitter and Facebook are also full of witness runners (posting with their real names and Marathon profile photos) attesting to their conduct:
You wouldn't know this reading the Glob.
"Equity" doesn't mean that half the street is for your party, and half the street is for the marathon runners.
The only race card that counts here has a number on it. A black man wins this race every single year.
These are people behaving badly, and then behaving badly about having behaved badly. They should be ashamed, and they should apologize.
Community Policing 101
Take this however you want.
Way back when, one of the promotional study books for the police was a book about community policing. I will always remember the chapter where they talk about how some things that may be issues in one community, may not be issues in other communities. They used an example of fixing a car on a street and in some cultures that is a way of life and culturally important to gather on a Saturday afternoon with a cooler of beer and work on their vehicle's engine on a nice day. This is acceptable even though it may violate some laws. Police departments should work with communities to determine which laws need to be enforced or even addressed as it should up to the community to determine which laws they want enforced, not the police or some lawmaker/politician who isn't impacted (the BAA in this case). Even the marathon has thousands of people with red solo cups with beer and absolutely zero enforcement except for people who are being disorderly or maybe appear really under age.
Anyway I predict this. Next year this group will have a nice little chunk of the course set out in an area where they can do whatever they want (in the end let's be honest they weren't being that bad this year.) Or they will have the metal gates that they have in Boston where no one will ever have access to the actual course. I bet that is what they will do and they will just eat the extra 500K or whatever for fences rather than to deal with this again.
well
Next year, when you see that all of the areas that would normally have rope barriers, now have metal barriers, you will know why.
What do they want?
Stay the fuck off the course while the race is en route.
That's not the same as "people crossing without police involvement".
You want to run down the sidewalk? Great. I bet there are no complaints.
You want to run on the course? Get a bib. Start at Hopkinton.
Jumping onto the course is a
Jumping onto the course is a real nuisance. I’ve seen well meaning spectators knock over actual marathoners by trying to cheer on their friends. Not cool!
In addition to that
I'd like to add that due to our history with the Marathon from just a decade ago that how is anyone else supposed to know that a spectator (Who has NO PLACE on the course) doesn't have ill intentions which could endanger runners and spectators?
Stay off the course …
… especially if you are told to do so. I ran through and was nearly "hit" by the confetti cannon (given the history in Boston, maybe cannons of any kind aren't a great idea) but it seems like the real issue was people on the course. Had I been impeded by a group of 10 people running with a banner I probably would have had some choice words myself! That said, I enjoyed the enthusiasm of the people cheering there and elsewhere on the course.
A few thoughts on this:
* Everyone in large groups pushes onto the course a little bit at times. Your friend comes along and you lean out to give a high five, and maybe don't wind up as far back as you had been. Rinse, repeat. So eventually cops walk up and down the course all along the way asking people to move back, and generally people do. Not ill will. People move back. It's fine. If the cops wound up in a line with bikes, it likely was after several times asking nicely to stay off the course.
* There's probably less leeway on Heartbreak Hill, too. Newton is a great place to have a cheer party because you can stake out ground on the old streetcar reservation on Comm Ave and set up chairs, a grill, tents, coolers, etc and have a party on public right-of-way which abuts the course. There is a lot of looking the other way that goes on (grills are probably not de jure allowed, adult beverages definitely not, but as long as everyone is behaved, no one seems to have an issue). But setting up on Heartbreak means that there might be a bit more scrutiny since it's arguably the most famous part of the course. With thick crowds, and probably several BAA officials. And also the one where the most people struggle.
* Don't run on the course without a number. But if you do, don't make it obvious. If one person jumps in the race and runs alongside a friend for a couple hundred feet on a flat section, no one is going to notice. If you need to cross the course, just jump into the race and run a few hundred feet diagonally across with the runners. This is easier as the race goes on. For runners in the 2:30 to 3:45 finish time (so, say, 11:45 to 1:00 in Newton) this is trickier, it's the densest part of the race and runners are moving pretty quickly. The rest of the day, use some discretion. One person running along isn't going to cause much of an issue. 10 people holding banners with a photographer? Yeah, that is going to raise some eyebrows. Given the carriage road parallels, you can cheer, then run, then cheer, then run, then cheer, running in parallel to your runner for miles. If you can keep up.
* What about bandits? People always used to run the course without numbers. What changed?
Two things.
1. 2013.
2. The race has gotten a lot bigger over the years. Up until the mid-1960s, there were only about 200 runners in the race. (Basically, outside of a few weirdos running wasn't a thing, especially for women.) The the running boom comes along and by 1979 there are 6000 to 9000 entrants each year. The BAA drops the qualifying time down and entries stagnate around 6000 for the next decade, then slowly increase as the BAA loosens qualifying times. 36000 people run the 100th marathon (all comers accepted) which seems all the more impressive given that it was quadruple the size of any previous Boston and they must have been guessing at logistics.
Back to 10,000 in 1997 and then slowly climbing to 26000 in 2009, when the race sells out and times are tightened again (before then, you could run a qualifier in December or January and send in an application). The bigger 2014 race shows that 30,000 is about what Hopkinton and the narrow roadways can handle, and the race has been there ever since.
In the days of the bandits, the bandit runners were at the back of a much smaller field. There are more runners, and those runners are more concentrated than other races. Boston's median finish time is 3:42 with a 43 minute standard deviation. NYC and Chicago have median finish times in the 4:30 range with 1:00+ standard deviations. So even with larger fields, the peak finishing times for Boston with 300 to 400 runners per minute are as high as, or higher than, NYC or Chicago. On narrower streets (most of Chicago and NY are on four-lane-wide streets, or wider). And much faster: Boston peaks at just-below-3-hour finishers running nearly 10 mph, NYC and Chicago's peaks are with runners only going about 6 mph. So when you combine the most concentrated field with the runners' speed and the narrow roads, there's a lot less space than there used to be and than there is anywhere else.
2013 was a good excuse to end banditing, but the size of the race and the logistics of 30,000 runners as opposed to 6,000 means that it was probably on its way out for a while.
tl;dr don't jump on the course and this won't be a problem. I assume there will be metal fencing along Heartbreak next year and that might not actually be a terrible idea. There is already metal fencing in parts of Newton (at the Firehouse, for example) so why not here, too?
"Don't run on the course without a number. "
Sure thing, Jock.
I mean, Switzer did have a number, but ...
What does that have to do with
the price of T in Chinatown?
Exactly!
The man pictured, who wasn't a participant but jumped into the race course anyway and risked disruption and injury to multiple runners, should not have been allowed to do that. It was right for the properly-registered runners, seen wearing numbers, to resist him and remove him from the course using reasonable physical force if necessary.
Leave it to white folk to make ambulating a joyless slog
Black joy is patholgized while enclosure and commodification of movement is accepted as "law and order"
Rude behavior
has nothing to do with race. Every sport has unwritten rules of etiquette. The members of the group in Newton fail to understand that their boorish behavior takes away from the enjoyment of spectators around them, and did in fact interfere with the runners. Try throwing something into the playing area in any other sport and see what happens.
Thousands of Black people ran
Thousands of Black people ran in and spectated this year's edition of this century-old road race, one of the highest-profile such events in the world, and nobody had any problem with their joy. This was about a small number of specific people, not all of whom are Black, who did specific things.
Lots of joy in all colors to be seen
I would go as far as to say that anyone on the sidelines of any race would be looked at a bit strangely if they WEREN'T doing one or more of the following: shouting, cheering, waving, jumping, holding signs, clanking cowbells, dancing, playing music, holding out hands for high-fives, holding out orange slices, eating food, etc.
In fact, I think the ONLY "expressions of joy" that are in any way frowned upon by the stodgy squares are if you hop the barriers into the course in front of the runners, or shoot projectiles there which could hit or pose a slip hazard for them.
Everyone seems to get this at other major sporting events, right? Or have I missed some fun basketball sidelines?