The city council’s public safety committee will meet today with police and university officials to discuss how to prevent violent city celebrations in the future after area universities and the Boston Police Department have both been blamed for the riots that followed the New England Patriots Super Bowl victory almost a month ago.
“We are concerned about the safety of citizens and students,” said Kate Sullivan, an aide to Councilor-At-Large Stephen Murphy, chairman of the public safety committee. “[We want to] bring all interested parties into the table.”
Sullivan said “a long list” of universities and representatives from the police department were invited to the public hearing, which will take place today at 5:30 at the Boston Latin School at 78 Louis Pasteur Ave.
Councilor Michael Ross (Fenway, Back Bay) said the council wants to “make sure that the events that went on can be prevented,” and to find ways “to move forward collectively.”
The night the Patriots won the Super Bowl, 21-year-old James Grabowski was killed and three others injured near Northeastern University when a car drove into a crowd on Symphony Road. At Kenmore Square, police resorted to the use of pepper spray to control a crowd of nearly 5,000 people, many of them students.
In other areas of the city, rioters flipped cars, vandalized property and set off illegal fireworks.
Although Boston University spokesman Colin Riley could not confirm whether representatives from BU would attend the hearing, he said the university is always willing to cooperate with the city.
Riley said many students were upset with the media’s coverage of the post-Super Bowl street violence because it suggested BU students were responsible for the riots.
“Our students behaved very well,” Riley said. “The person hanging from a light post in Kenmore was not a BU student,” he said. “Kenmore is not restricted to BU.”
“I’m not being defensive, but don’t single out BU students,” he said.
Riley said he has been at BU for many years and can attest to BU students ongoing good behavior.
“BU students are told regularly they are to be held accountable for their actions,” Riley said. “They are very well aware of it.”
On the evening of the Super Bowl, 12 officers and two supervisors from the Boston University Police Department were patrolling the campus, Riley said.
“It was a joyous celebration marred by the actions of a few,” he said.
Ross said he was glad to see the BU police presence the night of the Super Bowl. However, he added “They as much as anyone need to continue making improvements.”
“By and large, BU is a different situation [than Northeastern],” Ross said. “But we want to include them in the process.”
Northeastern spokeswoman Christine Phelan said the school’s vice president of public affairs, Robert Gittens, is planning to attend the meeting.
“We are looking forward to it,” she said. “We’ve consistently worked with the city and city council.”
Several Northeastern students were identified as rioters through a Northeastern website showing pictures from the night of the Super Bowl. Phelan said they had 15 full or partial identifications and that those students were being disciplined.
“We got a number of comments [from parents and neighbors] applauding the move,” she said.
Phelan said the university is forming a task force to keep the violence that followed the Super Bowl from happening again. She said Northeastern has also begun a dialogue with members of the community hoping to rebuild the school’s image.
Boston Police Department spokeswoman Mariellen Burns said representatives from the department will attend the hearing.
“We are doing our own review [of the situation], but we also need to work with other parties,” she said.
Burns said BPD officials have always worked with universities and meet with school officials at the beginning of each year, but after the Super Bowl riots the department would like to have more regular meetings.
“A big part of the changes [that will happen] is to make meetings more commonplace,” she said.
During the hearing, the city council wants to focus on what went wrong with police response that night, Ross said. The police department has come under fire for not having enough officers deployed to control the crowds. Ross said he had already talked to Kathleen O’Toole, Boston’s new police commissioner, who Mayor Thomas Menino appointed just one week after the riots.
“She’s taking this extremely seriously,” he said. Ross added that the council wants to review what is going on in campus environments and said he is concerned with Northeastern’s attitudes toward its student body.
Northeastern has zero tolerance for misbehavior on campus, which “causes students to blow off their steam off-campus,” Ross said.
“We should be embarrassed that students from any college engaged in this kind of behavior,” Ross said.
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