Hub had orderly game plan

9 February 2005

A quick thank-you to Tom Menino and Tom Payzant for driving yet another wedge between me and my children - this one over the Super Bowl victory parade.

You may have attended yesterday's "rolling rally." Indeed, you very well may have been one of the thousands of children who also attended. Their parents, more lenient than my wife and me and - I am told - more caring and understanding, let them skip school.

Mean parents that we are, we didn't.

Thanks for setting me up, guys. Why Tuesday? Why couldn't Boston have held the parade on a weekend, as it did with the Red Sox?

My theory: We didn't want to give the college kids a chance to regroup.

The wonder of this Pats' victory is not the 3-point margin but: Why no riots?

Let's see. There was a riot after the Patriots' first Super Bowl win in 2002. And another in October 2003, when the Red Sox defeated Oakland. The crowds grew even bigger with the Pats' second Super Bowl victory in February 2004. That time people were hurt; one, James Grabowski, died. Nine months later, Victoria Snelgrove was killed by a pellet gun in an even worse confrontation after the Sox beat the Yankees. After the World Series, the mobs were out yet again.

Boston got a national reputation: the new Detroit, home of the sore winners.

Yet it wasn't us, really. You didn't see throngs in Southie smashing windows or homeowners in Oak Square setting fires. Fans in their 80s who had waited entire lives for a Red Sox title weren't suddenly challenging cops in Kenmore Square. Roxbury and Dorchester dwellers weren't traveling in packs toward downtown.

No, it was college students. And as one college administrator observes, it's a new and disturbing phenomenon. "We weren't like this as kids," he says, and he's right.

It's not like the students really cared. Many are from out of state.

Alcohol? That seems the most popular explanation, but drinking has been around for a while; 30 years ago, in fact, it was legal for 18-year-olds to buy booze.

Some argue, instead, that rather than mindless behavior, the rioting is intentional: planned and abetted by text messaging that lets kids figure out where to congregate and simultaneously brag to their peers everywhere. Whether this reflects lousy upbringing, decaying morals or just the anomie of the idle, I don't know.

But I do know how to stop it: Treat it like a crime control problem.

The reason there were no riots? Pushed by a fed-up mayor, the city implemented policies much like those that have so reduced crime. That meant doing three things. First, make clear what is permitted and what is not. Second, make punishment certain, swift and severe. And third, nip it in the bud.

No longer did anyone dismiss the rioting as just kids acting up. Colleges warned that transgressions would meet with suspensions and expulsions. Police Commissioner Kathleen O'Toole arranged a massive show of force on Sunday night. And, more importantly, even minor misbehavior met with immediate response.

It worked. It is, of course, a shame it had to come to this; one recoils at the thought that we now need to assume the worst of our students. Menino did well. I'm still mad at him about my kids going to school. But I'm delighted everyone else's stayed off the streets.