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 Emergency responders racing to a crime scene without waiting for
orders might save lives by tending to the wounded, but during the
chaotic chase to catch the suspects a few days later, they also
risked being shot by police, the Harvard University report found.
The hairiest events after the bombing, which killed three people and
injured 264, began three days later when the two ethnic Chechen
brothers accused of planting the pressure-cooker bombs at the finish
line, shot and killed a university police officer in a failed
attempt to steal his gun and flee the city.
The shooting prompted hundreds of local police, as well as law
enforcement officials who had traveled from other towns to help with
the investigation, to race to Watertown, Massachusetts, where the
suspects traded shots with police.
Officers surrounded the suspects, placing police at a high risk of
shooting one another, the report found.
"They were incredibly lucky that there weren't a lot of friendly
fire casualties," said lead author Herman "Dutch" Leonard, a
professor of public management at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School
of Government.
The study was based on interviews with some 100 law enforcement and
other public officials who took part in the response.
One officer, Richard Donohue of the transit police, was badly
wounded in that gun battle and witnesses told local media that he
may have been accidentally shot by a fellow officer. No official
report on the shooting has been released.
That incident was not the only case in which possibly overtired
officers ran the risk of shooting one another, the report said. The
gunbattle ended in the death of one suspect, 26-year-old Tamerlan
Tsarnaev, while his younger brother Dzhokhar, now 20, managed to
elude police.
When the younger brother was found hiding in a drydocked boat the
next evening, dozens of police raced to the scene.
One officer on a rooftop fired at Tsarnaev, prompting "a substantial
volume of contagious fire" by other police at the scene, the report
found.
It noted that contagious gunfire, in which the sound of shots
prompts others to fire their weapons, poses a high risk in densely
populated areas such as the Watertown suburb of Boston where the
younger Tsarnaev was apprehended.
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The suspect is now awaiting trial on charges that carry the threat
of execution if he is convicted.
Despite problems during the manhunt, the report found that law
enforcement officials worked together smoothly on the day of the
bomb blasts, evidenced by the fact that most of the casualties, many
of whom lost legs, survived despite substantial loss of blood.
That coordinated effort was a result of years of planning and
coordination around the marathon, Boston's best-attended sporting
event.
The Harvard report suggests that law enforcement officials
responding to major security threats take more aggressive steps to
establish tactical command, including planning rest shifts so that
they are not relying on overtired officers.
The lessons of the response to the Boston bombing could easily apply
to future security scares, Leonard said.
"Any significant terrorist activity on the homeland is going to
generate a similar ramping up and presence of many different law
enforcement agencies," Leonard said.
"This event illustrates how much progress we've made since 9/11 and
Katrina in being able to form rapid command structures that are
effective," he said. "But we have a lot of work to do in projecting
the same philosophy down to operating on the street."
(Reporting by Scott Malone; editing by Gunna Dickson)
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