Last year (January 2015 to be exact), protesters blocked the Southeast Expressway. The day after the protest, Mayor Walsh fired one of the alleged protesters, Nelli Ruotsalainen, a part-time city worker. “(The Mayor) finds it unacceptable for a city employee to put public safety at risk,” a city spokesman said.
You may have seen the video last week of an off duty police officer, Edward P. Barrett, assaulting a pedestrian in broad daylight on a city street, pushing the pedestrian’s face into the ground. The excuse given was that the man hit the officer’s car with his umbrella.
Walsh’s reaction, after being shown the video, was a lot different from a year ago. “Clearly there was an incident where a gentleman hit an off-duty police officer’s car with an umbrella, we can’t be having that in the city of Boston. . . ”
Walsh seems less concerned with public safety these days than with smudges on car windows. When he fired, Ruotsalainen, it was done months before she had even had a pre trial conference. But for Barrett, there’s no rush. “Certainly during it, it seemed a little aggressive, but again, we’re going to wait and see what happens with internal affairs before we take any action, before I make any further comment on it.” said the Mayor.
“Walsh, like a lot of thugs, picks his victims according to how little they can fight back.”
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mike_cote says
and a bit hyperbolic, in my opinion.
bob-gardner says
I was also criticized for using that term last year. But I’m indulging myself by using my exact quote from last year. If calling the mayor a thug last year was a stretch then, it seems less a stretch now. There is certainly some thuggish behavior in that video that the mayor is being so non-judgmental about.
methuenprogressive says
arresting someone for cracking a cop’s windshield.
bob-gardner says
It was a smudge on the right rear window, not a cracked windshield.
methuenprogressive says
Your reality blind spot is showing.
bob-gardner says
The assailant works for him. We saw last year how quickly he can act when a city employee displeases him, even when what the city employee was out of town at the time, and even when the city job she was fired from had absolutely nothing to do with the act she was fired for.
Last week a city employee beat up a pedestrian on a city street in Boston, which, unlike the Southeast Expressway, Walsh is actually mayor of. The assailant claimed, on camera, that his city position empowered him to beat up the pedestrian. And all Walsh can do is criticize the victim for doing something which set the assailant off. Walsh is giving tacit approval to this thuggery. That makes him the head thug.
SomervilleTom says
The Southeast Expressway is a bumper-to-bumper parking lot EVERY DAY and has been for forty years. The protesters could dance naked in the southbound lanes at 5:30p and the effect on traffic would be unmeasurable. This spurious claim about stopping ambulances getting to hospitals is rubbish.
Regarding a cop assaulting a pedestrian, watch the videotape. Nobody’s windshield was cracked.
This comment has nothing whatsoever to do with reality.
Bob Neer says
If public safety is the issue, blocking a major highway is certainly a public safety risk, and on a lesser level so is banging on people’s cars with umbrellas.
stomv says
Of tackling a man and smashing his head to the ground because your windshield was banged on while you failed to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk?
What about that public safety implication?
P.S. The “what about the ambulance” nonsense is just that. If we really cared about ambulances getting through, we’d write a hell of a lot more tickets for blocking the box. We’d write a hell of a lot more tickets for double parking. Hell, we’d write a hell of a lot more tickets to motorists who fail to make way for emergency vehicles. But we don’t. That suggests that we, as a society, don’t really value those precious minutes for emergency vehicles so much as we use that excuse to come down hard on those who slow down our drive in our personal autos.
SomervilleTom says
The “public safety” argument is utter nonsense. If blocking the Southeast Expressway is a “public safety” issue, then the leaders of this great Commonwealth have egregiously and criminally endangered the public safety for at least forty years (I arrived here in 1974) by causing and then allowing said highway to be blocked for hours a day, in each direction, each and every day. This argument is utter nonsense.
Anyone who watches the videotape of the behavior of Edward P. Barrett sees a thug terrorizing a victim. Your attempt to defend this behavior is offensive. Mr. Barrett, the cop in question, needs to be prosecuted for assault and battery, stripped of his badge, and incarcerated.
I choose to live in Massachusetts because I want to live in a civilized state. The violent terror on display in that videotape epitomizes the kind of out-of-control police behavior that has no place in this state.
Heavily-armed thugs like Mr. Barrett walking the streets in police uniform are a FAR greater and FAR more immediate threat to me and my loved ones that any Muslim terrorist.
spence says
Is a far greater public health risk than hitting a car with an umbrella.
Christopher says
IMO both actions are inexcusable, but for very different reasons. There is also a world of difference between DELIBERATELY impeding traffic flow, and the mere happenstance of traffic.
SomervilleTom says
The claim was not that there is no difference between impeding traffic flow and “the mere happenstance of traffic”.
The claim was, instead, that public safety was put at risk because emergency vehicles were impeded by the protest. That claim is balderdash. If an ambulance is stuck in traffic and bad things happen to the patient in the ambulance, the cause of the traffic jam is irrelevant.
A more honest and accurate statement is something along the lines of “we tolerate the risks imposed by traffic jams, and we are unwilling to tolerate risks that are intentionally imposed”.
Blocking traffic with a protest is, in my view, one of the most effective non-violent disruptive tactics available. Such disruptions are the reason why such protests are organized. A protest that people can drive by and say “oh, look at that, isn’t that special” — and otherwise ignore — is a waste of everybody’s time.
The real reason why people don’t like blocking traffic has nothing to do with emergency vehicles. It has to do, instead, with FORCING people — like you — who would otherwise drive by to be inconvenienced. It has to do with adding a half hour or an hour to the drive time of a LOT of people.
It has to do with making suburbanites feel some of the pain that urban minorities experience every day.
Christopher says
…is look at those jerks making me late for work. I’d love for there to be fewer actual traffic jams, but there is no excuse to impede people’s day, and yes, there could very easily be safety ramifications. They are trespassing on a public way and need to protest where the people actually causing the problems are. We have a fundamental philosophical disagreement on this one. The cause of the jam is very relevant.
Christopher says
…if people engaging in these kind of tactics, whatever their beef is, were trying to win me as an ally, they fail miserably. Besides, it’s just as likely that many affected already were sympathetic to their cause. It just fundamentally violates my sense of Golden Rule ethics to impede the routines and especially safety of people who are not the perpetrators of whatever injustice is being protested.
SomervilleTom says
You are making a very different argument from the thread-starter. You are arguing philosophy — the thread-starter talked about emergency vehicles.
Those “jerks” absolutely ARE striving to make you late for work. That is the point. They are NOT trying to win you over, they gave up on that generations ago. They are forcing you to take on some inconvenience, so that you have more first-hand understanding of THEIR pain and suffering.
I think you’ll find that your “Golden Rule” approach brings little more than contempt from people who lose loved ones, especially children, every day to out-of-control violent thugs like Mr. Barrett. It means very little to people who lose jobs and wages that they depend on because suburbanites like you can’t be bothered to provide the public transportation they desperately need.
Here’s their version of your Golden Rule — “We’re doing to you today a TINY portion of what you’ve done to us for generations.” What you call a violation of your “Golden Rule ethics” they call legitimate pay-back.
Suburbanites like you ARE the problem, and disruptions like this DIRECTLY target the source of the problem — people like you who value their convenience more than the life-and-death issues these people face every day.
I think you and other suburbanites whose biggest fear is being late for work (oh, the pain!) should EXPECT more and more “jerks” to disrupt traffic like this more and more often — the most effective way to end the disruptions is to DEMAND that government address the problems that motivate these protests.
Peter Porcupine says
What was it within the purview of the City of Boston that they were protesting?
Christopher says
…the Golden Rule says do to others what you WOULD HAVE them do to you, not what they HAVE ALREADY DONE to you. In other words, “but he hit me first” is no excuse!
AmberPaw says
And I do not want people – male or female – with anger management issues as part of the thin blue line.
petr says
The video opens, as far as I can tell, with the UWM (Umbrella Wielding Madman) asking the RSE (Red Sox Employee) if he has a badge… which is just to say that everybody, except the aforementioned RSE, seems to have been caught off guard. From this we can infer the suddenness and the intensity of the response, on the part of RSE, was extreme. Obviously, this was completely necessary, as — it being ‘broad daylight’– there was no other excuse besides weaponry to wield so deadly an umbrella… The poor RSE, too, has at least 100+ pounds on that deceptively skinny looking UWM…
Well, I guess we can look forward to RSE’s everywhere policing pedestrian-vehicle interactions with more intense scrutiny from here on out. It can’t be that one RSE roided out over an insufficiently deferential UWM… Must be new policy coming from the Fenway hierarchy…
All seriousness aside… A police officer, not in uniform, nor on duty, reacting so strongly to something that probably happens a thousand times a day in the city, makes me thankful that the apparently entirely innocent kid was white… poor kid would probably be dead now if he wasn’t… Yeah, that’s a bit of a cheap shot, to be sure… but I’m sticking to it. Overkill is as overkill does…
bob-gardner says
The victim hasn’t come forward, and there is conflicting information from witnesses.
(That’s my paraphrase, but pretty close to his exact words a few minutes ago on WGBH.)
Still under investigation, apparently. It might be obvious, but I still want to point out that when Routsalainin was fired the whole procedure took less than 24 hours. No “victims” had to come forward, and nobody sat around waiting for conflicting information. And the Mayor’s office put out a press release.