Excerpt Mike Barnacle at Daily Beast:
Then, Friday night, with Moynihan near death on a city street, a bullet threatening his life, there occurred a predictable and alarming sequence of events. A crowd began to gather near the site where Angelo West was killed in an exchange of fire with police.
According to several Boston cops at the crime scene, people began calling them pigs, shouting “Ferguson…Ferguson” and “hands up…don’t shoot.” This despite the fact—the fact!—that an outside camera from a store next to where the shoot-out occurred captured the image of West emerging from the driver’s side of his car to instantly shoot Moynihan, who had not even drawn his weapon.
“This is where we are now,” one of the cops said. “Everyone has their own reality. Their own facts. The truth of the situation doesn’t matter. People want to believe what they think happened. Not what really happened. That’s the recent history of almost every encounter we have lately on the street.”