Author Archives: Larry Franz

Let’s Fast Forward to the Capture

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Late last night, after writing a long post about the Boston manhunt, I noticed that Wolf Blitzer had done another interview on CNN with the Watertown police chief. The headline on the interview suggested that the chief would lay out the details of the events in Watertown.

So I wondered if the chief had finally admitted that the manhunt failed to find its target even though that famous backyard boat appears to have been near the center of the 20-block search perimeter, only 2/10ths of a mile (a 4-minute walk) from where the suspect dumped his getaway car. I watched the whole interview to find out.

Oddly, when Blitzer got to the point of discussing the manhunt, he quickly moved ahead to the capture (“let’s fast forward”). Maybe he knew that it would be embarrassing for the chief to discuss the police’s failure to find the suspect.

Many years ago, when I worked in the Los Angeles County court system, I discovered that the news media always tend to get some of their facts wrong. Reporters would often cover trials that I was observing first-hand and then write stories that were inaccurate in some way.

No doubt, this inaccuracy is usually the result of simple human error. But other times, reporters ignore certain facts because they don’t fit the overall story they’re telling, or because certain facts would embarrass their sources (e.g. police chiefs who want to make their department look good).

The story we’re being told about the Boston bombing is that the police did a wonderful job protecting the citizens of Boston.

The fact that they couldn’t find a 19-year old college kid, hiding a couple of blocks from where he left his getaway car, doesn’t fit the narrative. (It’s also part of the narrative that it was reasonable to shut down a city of 4 million people in order to protect it.)

We are supposed to admire and be grateful to the people who protect us, whether it’s the police, the FBI or the U.S. Marines. Most of us are, up to a point. But some think that stories reflecting poorly on our protectors should be avoided, if possible. It’s almost as if we should behave or be treated like children who mustn’t question the competence or good faith of our parents.

Wolf asks how the suspect escaped at 10:18 and “fast forwards” at 11:28, not having received much of an answer:

http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2013/04/20/watertown-police-chief-to-cnns-wolf-blitzer-i-couldnt-have-been-more-proud-last-night-when-i-drove-home-to-be-part-of-such-a-profession/?iref=allsearch

Something That Doesn’t Make Sense About the Boston Manhunt

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When a major event occurs, the news media usually report certain facts over and over. Other facts, just as interesting or relevant, are often ignored. This has happened again in the case of the recent manhunt in a suburb of Boston.

The story that’s been told again and again is that the 19-year old suspect escaped on foot after his brother was killed in a shootout with the police. The police then established a 20-block perimeter and did an extensive search but couldn’t find him. After the police told everyone that they could come out of their houses again, a resident quickly discovered the suspect hiding in a boat in his backyard.

At a subsequent press conference, one of the officers in charge said that the suspect was able to escape on foot because it was dark and there was a lot of smoke from the gunfire and explosives. He also said that the suspect wasn’t found during the door-to-door manhunt because his hiding place was just outside the search perimeter.

But this story didn’t sound right. There had been reports that the suspect drove away from the shootout, after running over his brother. He must have left his car (the highjacked SUV) somewhere, but that wasn’t discussed in the news reports. If the suspect ran away on foot, as the police said, it was also curious that he was able to find a hiding place just outside the perimeter. How far did he run? Where was the perimeter set up so that it didn’t include 67 Franklin Street, his eventual hiding place?

It wasn’t easy to figure out what happened, since the exact locations and the use of the getaway car weren’t discussed in the national media reports. But after some internet searching, it appears that this is what actually happened. It doesn’t make the police look especially good.

The gun battle occurred near the intersection of Laurel Avenue and Dexter Street in Watertown.

The suspect, leaving his brother behind, then drove west on Laurel Avenue, past School Street, where Laurel turns into Spruce Street. He continued driving west on Spruce, past another 20 houses or so, and then drove up Spruce as it curves towards the northwest. This is plausible — he drove about 4/10ths of a mile from the gun battle, around a bend in the road, and then parked the car near the intersection of Spruce and Lincoln Avenue. This is where the empty SUV was found.

The suspect then ran away on foot. It’s not clear what route he took, but it seems unlikely that he would continue walking northwest on Spruce. The most direct route from the Spruce/Lincoln intersection to his hiding place is to go west on Lincoln, cross over Walnut Ave, and then head down Franklin Avenue (or parallel to it), eventually finding the boat at 67 Franklin.  

The distance from the Spruce/Lincoln intersection to 67 Franklin Street is only 2/10ths of a mile. Google says it’s about a 4-minute walk. We don’t know if he went in a straight line, but it makes sense that he quit walking when he saw a likely hiding place.

Point A is where the SUV was left. Point B is where the suspect was found.

So the suspect traveled 6 or 7/10ths of a mile from the gun battle, by SUV and on foot, and ended up only 2/10ths of a mile from the SUV. Why wasn’t he found during the manhunt?

I couldn’t find a map of the 20-block search perimeter anywhere. According to some news reports, however, the perimeter was bordered by two major streets: Mount Auburn Street on the north and Arsenal Street on the south (since Mount Auburn runs toward the southwest, these two streets eventually intersect). 

It turns out that, according to someone who claims to have been listening to a police scanner, the eastern boundary of the perimeter was School Street, which runs north and south. These three streets (Mount Auburn, Arsenal and School) form a right triangle, roughly the shape of New York State, with the right angle being the intersection of Arsenal and School.

Is this the 20-block perimeter? The streets in this area don’t form a grid, so it’s difficult to count the blocks. But it seems to be in the vicinity of 20 blocks, if you average them out (some of the blocks are relatively small and some are relatively large).

It does seem plausible that this triangle is the perimeter. Its boundaries are major streets — perhaps the police thought that the suspect wouldn’t have been able to cross any major streets on foot, given all the officers in the area. For another reason, the intersection of Lincoln and Spruce is roughly near the center of the triangle. It makes sense to establish a perimeter around the place where the suspect started escaping on foot.

What’s remarkable about this perimeter, however, is that 67 Franklin Street is also near the center of the triangle (which makes sense, since it’s only 2/10ths of a mile away from where the SUV was found).

Yet during the post-capture press conference, when a reporter asked the officer in charge how the suspect was able to escape the manhunt, the officer said that 67 Franklin Street was “just outside the perimeter”. 

Maybe it was, but that doesn’t seem to be the case unless the perimeter was established somewhere else, downplaying the location of the empty SUV. Is it possible that someone was supposed to search around 67 Franklin and simply missed the suspect? Is it possible that the suspect hid somewhere else and eventually found his way to 67 Franklin, after that address had been searched? Is it possible that there was a trail of blood from the SUV to the boat that nobody noticed? Could dogs have been used to track the suspect?

And how could smoke have obscured suspect #2’s escape if he simply drove down Spruce Street after the gun battle, getting out of the SUV 6/10ths of a mile away? Did anyone actually pursue suspect #2 after the gun battle or was everyone (understandably) tending to suspect #1 and the officer who was wounded?

None of this is clear, but neither is the explanation given by the police.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter what actually happened, so long as the suspect was caught. But there was something that didn’t make sense and now, to me anyway, it does.

“gun battle at Dexter and Laurel Streets”:

http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2013/04/18/mit-police-officer-hit-gunfire-cambridge-police-dispatcher-says/UAbtwLVGLwBE5VI7BUyQuL/story.html

“Abandoned SUV at Laurel and Spruce St”:

http://twitchy.com/2013/04/19/watertown-mass-area-carjacking-related-to-mit-shooting-police-chase-underway-explosions-heard/

“20-block perimeter bordered by Arsenal Street and Mount Auburn Avenue”:

http://amestrib.com/sections/news/nation/one-suspect-killed-another-sought-boston-bombing.html

“Perimeter: Mt. Auburn to Arsenal St. to School St.”:

http://muckrack.com/jaredbkeller/statuses/325112569952096257

Postscript on 4/23:

In the comments, someone has pointed out that the police may have searched east of Walnut Street. Maybe they got a tip that convinced them to do that. I still think it would have been odd that such an intensive search didn’t include areas closer to where the SUV was abandoned. Searching an area of 20 blocks east of Walnut would mean that the search was seriously skewed toward the east. Reporters should have asked about this by now, or the police should have explained their decision without being asked.

Maybe some journalist is writing a book about these events already, and it will all become clear one day.

If nothing else, however, the people who were told to stay in their houses deserve an explanation, especially since Tsarnaev was found only after a resident was told it was relatively safe to leave his house (although it was still relatively dangerous, considering who was in his backyard).

#1 Songs — The Good, Bad and In Between

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According to this website, a professor and archivist named Hugo Keesing put together a few seconds of every Billboard #1 hit starting in January 1956 and continuing for several decades after that. The text says that he got the idea from radio station WOR-FM in New York.

Listening to this is an interesting experience, but I gave up somewhere around 20 minutes into Part 1 when Bobby Goldsboro sang “Honey” (a #1 considered by some to be the worst song of all time).

There are obviously lessons to be learned from hearing what were the best-selling or most popular songs in America (according to Billboard magazine). My main reactions were “I remember that one” and “Wow”.

http://www.ubu.com/sound/keesing.html

Worlds Upon Worlds, According to George Eliot

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Coincidentally, after writing this morning about the great philosopher David Lewis’s strange position concerning possible worlds, I read the following in George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda:

“Suppose he had introduced himself as one of the strictest reasoners. Do they form a body of men hitherto free from false conclusions and illusory speculations? The driest argument has its hallucinations, too hastily concluding that its net will now at last be large enough to hold the universe. Men may dream in demonstrations, and cut out an illusory world in the shape of axioms, definitions and propositions, with a final exclusion of fact signed Q.E.D. No formulas for thinking will save us mortals from mistake in our imperfect apprehension of the matter to be thought about….the unemotional intellect may carry us into a mathematical dreamland where nothing is but what is not….”

Eliot (born Mary Anne Evans) was no mean philosopher herself. And she could certainly turn a phrase.

Worlds Upon Worlds, According to David Lewis

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David Lewis, who spent most of his career at Princeton, was one of the most respected  philosophers of the 20th century. Yet he is most famous for advocating a philosophical view that almost everyone else rejects.

In his 1986 book On the Plurality of Worlds, Lewis argued for a position he called “modal realism”. This is the idea that there are an infinite number of possible worlds (i.e. self-contained universes) different from our own, and that all of these possible worlds are as real as the world we live in. The only fact that sets our world apart from the rest of them is that it is ours.

Saying, therefore, that our world is the “actual” world is no different from saying that I am “here” and the time is “now”. There are people just like us and as real as you and me existing in other worlds who believe that their world is the only “actual” world. They are just as correct in their belief as we are in ours.

Most philosophers are comfortable with talking about possible worlds. They use this terminology to explain, for example, the nature of necessity and what it means to say that something could have happened but didn’t. A statement is necessarily true if it is true in every possible world. An event could have happened if it happened in some possible world, especially one similar to our own. Yet philosophers almost all deny that other possible worlds are as concretely real as this one.

Lewis knew, of course, that modal realism is very hard to accept. It clearly conflicts with common sense and ordinary language. He described the natural response to his position as the “incredulous stare” (as in “You can’t be serious, Professor Lewis!”). But he argued that there are excellent theoretical reasons for accepting modal realism. He thought that it best explains what it is to be a possible world.

It takes some education and intelligence to appreciate Lewis’s reasons for adopting modal realism and his arguments against competing views. Personally, I’m tempted to say that modal realism is self-contradictory. To claim that possible worlds exist in the same way that the actual world exists sounds like a contradiction in terms. (Which might explain why Lewis found modal realism to be such a useful view. Logic says that if you start with a contradiction, you can prove anything at all.)  

On the other hand, many physicists believe that there are a multitude of universes, completely separate from each other, yet equally real. That might seem to be what Lewis had in mind, but it’s really not. For philosophers, there is a possible world for each possibility, every single one (although only one of them, contra Lewis, is real). For physicists, there might be many, many real worlds, just as real as ours, but they don’t reflect every single possibility. They are merely the result of whatever natural processes result in the creation of new universes.

In the philosophical sense, therefore, there is a possible world in which donkeys do calculus, since very bright donkeys could conceivably do that. Physicists don’t go that far, since there is no reason to believe that animals like donkeys (no offense, donkeys) would ever develop an interest in advanced mathematics.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_realism

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/#6