"While particularly proficient in the area of tactical operations, the department lacks the training, leadership, and culture necessary to truly engender community policing and to build and sustain trusting relationships with the community," the report states.
Police Chief Anthony Batts called a department-wide tactical alert and his depleted department worked overtime to arrest the shooter and the driver; both face murder charges and have denied their involvement.
But police officials have acknowledged in interviews that the department's tactical and strategic decisions may have contributed to a set of circumstances that permitted some of the worst incidents of violence to go forward unchecked.
In addition, Commissioner O'Toole said Friday afternoon that she would meet with the department's tactical commanders and consider whether to stop using the pepper-spray weapon, which is a paintball-like gun that fires plastic balls filled with a variant of cayenne pepper.
On Thursday afternoon, critics of the magazine cover found their hero: the Massachusetts State Police Sergeant Sean Murphy, who has worked for twenty-five yeass as a "tactical photographer" for the department, and who delivered to Boston magazine never-before-released photos that he took of the manhunt for Tsarnaev.
But that argument is disputed by criminologists and civil liberties groups who point instead to a top-down cause of militarized policing: billions of dollars of taxpayers' money that has been spent since 9/11 acquiring tactical equipment for police departments by the federal government.
The agreement also reins in the department's special tactical units, which have drawn much criticism over the years.
Sensible reasons to consider outsourcing include both strategic and tactical concerns on both a department and organizational level.
"With all that experience in blast resistance, we decided to branch off into tactical vehicles tailored to police departments at home," said the company's Sally Stefova.
The police response to a hostage incident is a multifaceted response, requiring the coordination and cooperation of patrol, the tactical team, the negotiating team, and department supervisors.
