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Man mugged by thugs in hoodies in Kenmore Square
By adamg on Wed, 03/25/2009 - 9:02am
Boston University Police report a man walking on the stairs Blandford Street to Beacon Street was mugged by a couple of Hispanic males. However, he managed to fend them off and they were unable to wrest his backpack from him.
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Comments
When writing the log...
...did they happen to mention that the suspects were Hispanic?
Why, yes, they did
And?
Were they males too?
They mentioned it four times. It seemed a little repetitive. Why not write "suspect" and "victim" after the first discription like most police logs?
Not mentioned:
were the 'thugs' drunken BU students?
Police writing has different
Police writing has different considerations than most other prose.
Artful use of anaphoric reference and such can be counterproductive, or simply not that important.
Not in a building
Those stairs are not in a building - they are outdoor stairs which run from Beacon Street just before the overpass down to Blandford Street.
Fixed
Thanks for the correction; I've adjusted the post accordingly.
Backpacks and courier bags
Every hear how a cross-slung courier bag or a backpack make you less of a mugging target?
This is why. The harder it is to grab and go, the less likely it is that people will even try, let alone succeed in separating you from your possessions.
There is also a lesson here about yakking on your cell phone or using headphones when you really should be paying attention to your environment.
Of course there will be the occasional stupid criminal who doesn't know this - and I bet when they catch these guys they will be both young and/or have a long history of difficulty in school for one reason or another.
Im sorry, but how does being
Im sorry, but how does being on the cell phone have any affect on what happened here?
At BU, theyre called the rape stairs. Theyre between the back of a building and a highway. When youre using them, nobody can see you. Theyre also very steep. Read what happened. Not being on the phone wouldnt have helped him. Someone passed him going up and then turned to push him into the partner that was probably hidden from view at the bottom.
Cell phones make you safer. Say he was stabbed, the person at the other end could have heard the struggle and called police.
However, if one's yakking with a friend on a cellphone,
then they're not really paying attention to what's happening around them, which is of utmost importance when walking around at night. There's no guarantee that a person won't get mugged, but paying attention to what's happening around them will at least reduce one's chances of being attacked.
It's possible
In pedestrian-heavy Cambridge, I see a lot of people talking on their phones who seem to very aware of their surroundings.
Many women, especially, seem to make a point to be talking on their phones while walking alone *because* they're in a place and/or time of day in which they don't feel entirely safe.
I think that's actually a good idea, as I said before.
(Incidentally, I give wide berth to women walking alone in quiet areas, especially since I tend to be a speedwalker. I don't want to make anyone nervous, and I also don't want some crazy person to Mace me just for walking past. Though, every now and then, a woman who seems to be cautious of someone else will do something like cross the street mid-block to right in front of me. I guess I look harmless, even if I don't look big enough to slow down any attacker much. :)
being on a celphone during a
being on a celphone during a mugging helped a friend of mine. he jsut said his location and that he was being mugged. cops showed right up and found the guys minutes later. if he wasnt on his cell, which they took, he would have been SOL.
Cellphones
I think that talking on a cellphone *if* you're aware of your surroundings and projecting awareness and confidence, is a big safety win wrt street robberies.
If the cellphone is distracting you, however, it very well may increase your real and perceived net vulnerability.
neilvandyke:
This:
is precisely what I'm getting at, because, often enough it does happen.
Stairs were probably better used
when they led to the Nickelodeon movie theatre (and had a big sign saying so)
Mostly summer
The stairs are heavily used through the summer and fall by people parking in and around those blocks of BU and heading to Fenway Park (PS, Boston, a crosswalk in that area would be nice). They're also used by anyone wanting to get to the C and, more likely, the D lines.
Theyre heavily used all year
Theyre heavily used all year long by BU students who live in south campus (across the pike) and have to get to campus either through those stairs or via st marys street
Why aren't those stairs better lit?
They should be.