The MBTA Transit Police Benevolent Fund has set up a donations page for Officer Richard H. Donohue, who was wounded in the Watertown incident. He's reported to be stable and likely to recover, although it will be a while.
The MBTA seems to be the traditional blue-collar lifelong career path in Boston. Jobs are in high enough demand that the T holds a lottery when they do their hiring. It's also where you're most likely to hear the (in)famous Boston/Cambridge accent, outside of Car Talk -- it's not uncommon for a driver on the Red Line to announce stops at Hahvahd and Poatah instead of Harvard and Porter. (Before you ask: yes, you can actually park the car at Harvard Yard, but only if you're a Harvard student dragging your stuff into one of the dorms during move-in weekend. There technically exists parking in the vicinity of Harvard Yard, but as a practical matter, you should not really count on being able to stop the car anywhere in Cambridge. It is, in all sincerity, easier to park a couple of towns away, and take the train in.) The Transit Police are actual police, not rent-a-cops, with jurisdiction over stuff that happens in the T. Like regional law enforcement, they spend more of their time handling nuisance calls than serious badness, but they can and do keep things running mostly smoothly underground.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has also held a memorial service for Officer Sean Collier, a member of the MIT police force who was killed in the earlier shootout. To give some perspective on how meaningful the community finds this, they were allowed to shut down Massachusetts Avenue for the procession -- one of the two main arteries through Cambridge, which feeds one of the major bridges that goes across the Charles into Boston proper -- from 7am to 3pm, on a Wednesday. MIT News has posted video of the memorial service here, for those who were unable to attend in person.
The larger universities in the area are bigger than some of the smaller towns, and the university police liase a lot with the community. Tufts is a mostly self-contained campus, and I still sometimes see their patrol cars driving around the fringes, where I live. MIT and Harvard are integrated with Cambridge (i.e., they have buildings strung all over the damn place, interspersed with regular businesses and sometimes homes), so their internal police forces are even more a part of the surrounding city. The crowd at Officer Collier's memorial, including law enforcement officers from around the country, was estimated at about 10,000 people.
The MBTA seems to be the traditional blue-collar lifelong career path in Boston. Jobs are in high enough demand that the T holds a lottery when they do their hiring. It's also where you're most likely to hear the (in)famous Boston/Cambridge accent, outside of Car Talk -- it's not uncommon for a driver on the Red Line to announce stops at Hahvahd and Poatah instead of Harvard and Porter. (Before you ask: yes, you can actually park the car at Harvard Yard, but only if you're a Harvard student dragging your stuff into one of the dorms during move-in weekend. There technically exists parking in the vicinity of Harvard Yard, but as a practical matter, you should not really count on being able to stop the car anywhere in Cambridge. It is, in all sincerity, easier to park a couple of towns away, and take the train in.) The Transit Police are actual police, not rent-a-cops, with jurisdiction over stuff that happens in the T. Like regional law enforcement, they spend more of their time handling nuisance calls than serious badness, but they can and do keep things running mostly smoothly underground.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has also held a memorial service for Officer Sean Collier, a member of the MIT police force who was killed in the earlier shootout. To give some perspective on how meaningful the community finds this, they were allowed to shut down Massachusetts Avenue for the procession -- one of the two main arteries through Cambridge, which feeds one of the major bridges that goes across the Charles into Boston proper -- from 7am to 3pm, on a Wednesday. MIT News has posted video of the memorial service here, for those who were unable to attend in person.
The larger universities in the area are bigger than some of the smaller towns, and the university police liase a lot with the community. Tufts is a mostly self-contained campus, and I still sometimes see their patrol cars driving around the fringes, where I live. MIT and Harvard are integrated with Cambridge (i.e., they have buildings strung all over the damn place, interspersed with regular businesses and sometimes homes), so their internal police forces are even more a part of the surrounding city. The crowd at Officer Collier's memorial, including law enforcement officers from around the country, was estimated at about 10,000 people.
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