MIT issued an emergency alert at 10:48 on Monay night reporting shots fired on the university campus. The school newspaper reports, "Shots fired near 32 Vassar St (Stata Center), police officer down. Please stay inside." For now, details are scarce, but the suspect is on the loose and considered armed and extremely dangerous.
This is a developing story. We'll update you as new information comes in.
I find it very interesting, that there are such websites.
I wonder whether it works, but I guess that if only one life is saved by a notice on a website, that is enough
At this point that most higher-ed websites not only have their emergency website, but also a whole system. A lot of universities send out text messages simultaneously.
This is beamed out to sites that people are actually likely to be looking at meaning it is all inbound to that link. I saw it appear on my FB feed moments after it was posted. My Tweetdeck column for "MIT shooter" is moving nearly as rapidly as the one for #BostonMarathonExplosion and almost everyone is sharing the link to them MIT site.
You know I had never thought about that, but Twitter really is the rapid alert system nowadays. You only really need to push messages to a few select parties then boom, everyone knows. It has to be as effective or more than any other alert system we use.
My last job was doing websites for higher education, and I can tell you that it's very much a thing. It's a part of many universities' emergency protocols, sometimes paired with an alert banner on the homepage. (And that banner may or may not link to a further page of information.)
While things like a gunman on campus is most certainly an emergency, these systems also serve other messages. Things like other emergencies (earthquakes, for example), snow days, we're just testing the emergency alarms today, etc.
Edit because I had another thought: the whole field of emergency preparedness in higher education is rather fascinating. Most of what I found interesting I had heard second-hand from clients, but you might find it quite interesting.
At my old uni, you could submit a cell number to an emergency alert system and you would get texts if something like this went down. I'm guessing MIT has something similar although not sure if this system is part of it. I'm sure someone will clarify soon.
I wrote a system that did that for students. It was a ton of fun to work on. And then it didn't work because the cell phone towers couldn't handle it. So of course they scrapped my code, went with a third-party system, and had the same problem.
Text messages during emergencies? Not a chance. Not when they don't even work for a simple test (hour delays!)
MIT's system has been alerting me with automated phone calls and text messages within minutes of emergency reports. I've been really pleased with the speed of the system.
My uni has just that, and the nagging question I keep asking myself is just how much money are they spending on that service that is profoundly useless. When there is an emergency the police show up damn quick, and there is nothing to be gained for people on the other side of campus to receive a text that building X is on fire. I feel the money would be of more use elsewhere.
Many places face hazards that have a delay before hitting - tsunami is one I know of specifically, and gunmen wondering around would seem to be relevant here. How is this not the best sort of alert system?
> Many places face hazards that have a delay before hitting
You ask yourself how people dealt with large-scale civil emergencies before cellphones became widespread. There were such things as warning sirens, and of course the police with loudspeaker vans. They are still doing that today - every time a hurricane is set to hit Miami the emergency services make the rounds of low-lying areas to get the word out to the homeless.
And a gunman or shooter on campus just cannot be hid - people shout warnings, someone will alert the police, who will then cordon off the area. The costs for the messaging system are obvious, high, and altogether the thing appears more like ass-covering for the administration than something that has tangible benefits.
Loud speakers aren't very effective if populations are spread out, or if one speaker fails many may be uninformed. However I agree SMS isn't a perfect solution either. The phone may be off, people may not have one, low signal etc. It's one more tool to communicate with as I see it.
Well if you truly meant one life saved fair enough.
So you'd have to deducted the people killed in making sites like these first. So a web site is possibly $40,000. A humans life in the US is probably worth around $2,000,000. So it might cost one 50th of a humans life to create a site like this.
I'd guess not, but the figures are complicated, the site is used for other things for starters.
I'd suspect a suicide help line would be better money spent. Don't drink and drive campaigns, healthy eating, quitting smoking help all far better returns I'd guess.
1. Human lives are valued at between $6 and $8 million in the US.
This is not what can be produced in the average human life, which is probably more like $1 million as I estimated recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5543848 . Instead, it's how much it costs to save a human life on the margin, which is the applicable number here.
2. My impression from previous things I've read is that suicide lines are largely ineffective.
Life insurance payouts are actually an even worse measure of value here. Life insurance payouts should be set by the liabilities left over when someone dies (i.e. children that still need to be raised). A person with no dependents doesn't need life insurance (except for funeral expenses), but that doesn't mean orders of magnitude less should be spent to save their life.
Should be but frequently are not. Life insurance is frequently based on current income rather than current liabilities, and that is before we get into known cases of fraud involving murder for the insurance money.
Still I agree with you. Have a couple of upvotes. You can put a dollar value on a human life but it doesn't really cover it. Life is more than dollars and cents.
Economists figure these things out by looking at how much people value their own lives (e.g. how much of a salary increase people expect for high risk jobs). The figures calculated are surprisingly low (IIRC ~$300,000 for an Australian in the late 90s). You need to do this kind of analysis to do cost/benefit analysis -- e.g. should we spend money on making a road safer or building a new hospital?
According to Wikipedia -- $6-7M per life in the US.
If you can save 1 life by spending $2.5M and instead you build 50 websites for $50k then it is reasonable to say that the site cost 1/50th of a human life.
There are things at play other than life or death. Let's say you work on campus. There's a shooting and you're freaking out and there all kinds of rumors circulating about what you should do. When's it safe to leave? Should you evacuate? etc. Having a central place where all of that is available is valuable to a huge number of people. Multiply that number by whatever monetary value you attach to that peace of mind and you end up with something that certainly justifies the cost.
Don't wish to make light of this at all, but I do wonder- how often does this happen? After all, "shots fired" is not an uncommon thing in many cities in the US.
I just wonder whether we will look back in 12 months time at the "week of hell" and realise that it was actually just a week in which we found all the things that usually go on every week that we don't hear about.
Some crime happens on a college campus probably every day. Most likely hundreds of violent crimes a year. But the reason this is on HN is MIT, nothing more.
We recently built an app that tracks this based on official US government data - per the Cleary act every US college that receives Federal funds must declare their on-campus crime rate. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/campus-sentinel/id513108130?... - you can compare MIT to other campuses.
There is a serious problem with HN when stories like this get so many up-votes. This story is against the site guidelines. There isn't anything deeply interesting in the comments.
Maybe. Also based on a photo of the crime scene that was sent out, it looks the officer was shot right outside Stata, so the robber could have been running through campus.
Seconded (2000-2004). And I've lived near campus ever since, and nothing like this has happened. Some shootings in Central Square, but never on campus. I'd say this is a pretty big deal.
I went to MIT as an undergrad and on my very first day there, there was a gunfight right outside my dorm window between police and an armed fugitive. Next House was under construction at the time, and the fugitive ran into the construction site and fired back. It was exactly like a scene in a movie.
I'd like to tell you what happened next, but I got down on the floor until the commotion ended.
A fair number of muggings with knives/guns in Cambridge, though. (I had someone pull a knife on me near the Harvard Bridge Boston side late at night).
"On campus" is kind of a more vague thing with MIT than with some other schools, since it was in the 1990s and before a very open campus in the middle of a city, with a few major roads running through it.
Somewhere around 2004 someone was shot in the head at a restaurant across from Random Hall as part of some drug related dispute. I heard the shot, but thought at first it was part of a video game my friend was playing. And that cook at the student center was stabbed not that long ago in some other dispute not related to students.
While I was there, there were no shootings, but two stabbings. Both by people known to the victims, though, not random acts of violence. Not that that makes it any better or anything. :-/
I just wonder whether we will look back in 12 months time at the "week of hell"
The mid-April week has always had a higher-than-normal rate of manic-type (e.g. spree killings) violence, and there are a lot of theories about it (spring inciting grandeur in unstable men) but no one knows why. Those are very rare, high-visibility events, though. Overall, that time is no more dangerous than any other. (There's only about a +/- 5 percent seasonal difference in violent crime, with summer and December being the worst).
Tax day is a factor, but other anniversaries are likely to set off right-wing assailants. OKC and Waco both occurred in mid-April. Hitler was born and died in April (relevant only for certain brands of right-wing assailants).
Yes and no, I think. The government building evacuations and suspicious package stories on Tuesday got a lot more attention than normal, but the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion was extremely dramatic and probably not hyped up by simply being days after the bombings.
Gun violence is a very uncommon thing in Boston or Cambridge...it's big news here every time it happens. Now outside the city, in the areas where poor people live, it's a different story...but MIT and Harvard are located in some of the wealthiest, safest areas of Cambridge.
Agreed. I generally feel incredibly safe around Cambridge in general- let alone on Boylston St near the library, or anywhere on MIT's campus. At most I'd expect to have something stolen, car broken into or a common mugging around there- not a random shooter running around.
Hmmm, it was a year after I left the area, but in 1992 a student was stabbed to death in front of the main library by a local juvenile sociopath (who only served 10 years, Massachusetts "justice" being what it is), see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Yngve_Raustein. And that was not much of a surprise based on the dozen years I'd spent in and around MIT before I left.
Has it really gotten a lot safer. not counting this unique sort of incident?
(I have family in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan)
Generally speaking, the areas around MIT and Harvard are relatively safe, although muggings and petty theft aren't unheard of. Things have been a lot better since they cleaned up Central Square in the 1990's.
I agree that most of Cambridge and much of Boston are very safe and gun violence would be big news. But there are neighborhoods of Boston (ie officially part of Boston) that have shootings frequently. They are never reported unless there are deaths, and even then many people don't take notice.
Boston has about 60 murders per year. 56% of murders in Massachusetts involve a firearm. Therefore, Boston sees about three murders involving a firearm per month on average.
This does not, of course, include justifiable homicides.
ETA: So as not to scare anyone remember that in major cities typically between 65% and 91% of murder victims are criminals, and most of the killings are gang related.
I shoot pretty regularly, so gunshots aren't foreign to me at all. But I would be seriously, seriously disturbed if I heard them off-range.
Generally, Americans do the "Out of sight, out of mind" thing when they hear about violence. They only care when it's happening in situations where they could see themselves.
Kid gets shot walking on the sidewalk in inner-city Camden for wearing the wrong color shirt? Meh, he was probably a gangbanger anyway.
Kid gets shot in Cambridge? Oh no, the sky is falling.
I once lived in a part of Los Angeles that at one point I heard at least two gun shootings per week for about a year. Fortunately every year since about 7 years ago shootings in that area gradually declined.
When I used to live in Philadelphia, summer holiday nights used to be very unnerving. Previously I had thought that firing guns wildly into the air in some form of celebration was something that was only done in underdeveloped countries... I grew up in a very rural area where there were lots of guns, but nobody was that irresponsible with them.
At the very least, in the specific case of people firing their guns wildly into the air on holidays, I think it is fair to say that there is plenty of room for improvement.
I don't think he was suggesting it should be made illegal to do that, and obviously I know that it already is...
I am quite pro-gun (remember the part about growing up around a lot of responsible gun owners?), but you making the kind of comments that make me strongly reconsider identifying that way. Hurling insults around does not contribute to the discussion; it is just childish and makes you look desperate.
He has backed up that statement, while you have done nothing but hurl insults. I understand that you may feel insulted by what he said, but that is no excuse for the quality of your comments.
Of course, as jlgreco pointed out, you're only showing your ignorance to the topic and hand by trying to deflect the real issue with insults at me.
It's shocking/hilarious/sad you need to resort to that, instead of actually addressing the issue at hand.
I don't think shooting in the air is really an issue in the US. I do feel bad for insecure souls that need to believe America is an underdeveloped nation. Or were you joking about that?
I don't believe America is an underdeveloped nation, exactly.
If you compare stats for all the factors that really make a difference for quality of life for the average person on the street (healthcare, education, death rates, crime rates, pollution, safety, etc. just to name a few), you'll see America is very often comparable to developing nations, and not often comparable to developed nations. In many cases, it's staggering far behind the best in the world.
I grew up in a less rural area, edge of Joplin, MO, across a significant road there was a working farm, turn left 90 degrees the local college, and while I've heard utility gun fire (often ours), don't think I've ever heard a shot in anger. Which would also include the dozen years I spent in and around MIT and then another dozen in the D.C. area.
Although, I've been there couple of times, yes I totally agree with you. A couple of times in my visit, gun shots plus/followed by siren wails in the distance have had the combined effect of inducing sleepless nights and prayer-mode in me, many times. :-)
I know, I know... crossing the street, swimming, etc., all carry equal risks, but for a lot of people like me, "rat-a-tat" and "bang-bang-kapwing" is great, as long as it is seen on comic books, films and cheesy batman TV serials.
Umm... The risk might be equal to those things, but where you normally live doesn't have a gun risk anywhere near that high. It's like saying that an astronauts risk if blowing up on the launch pad is the same as his risk of being hit by a car. It might be true, but most people don't have that risk (or the stress and fear it causes, which may elevate the risk of other health issues).
The US is a big place, it depends on where you are. Where I grew up half the boys in my class would go deer hunting with their fathers. While gun violence was rare, guns were not. Now I live in Boston. Here there's literally the toughest gun laws in the country. There a very few legal guns in the city (and most of the illegal ones gravitate towards area of higher crime such as Roxbury), in fact a lot of the people I work with are even troubled with the fact that I know how to operate one. Its a different culture.
Heh, it seems so weird to hear somebody say that. My maternal grandfather purchased my first rifle for me before I was born. When I was about 9 or so, my dad gave it to me, and took me out and taught me to shoot, taught me gun safety and - maybe most importantly - drilled into my head the importance of respect for human life, and how you never point a gun at someone unless you absolutely need to kill them (because they are an active threat to your own safety).
Then again, I grew up in a very rural area, but guns are - from my perspective - an absolutely routine, normal, everyday part of life. I guess that's why I find it so hard to "get" the mindset of the radical antigunners here, who act like guns are intrinsically "evil" and seem to think that a gun can pick itself up off a table and go out and shoot somebody.
Shots fired often? San Jose, yes. Right next door in Santa Clara? No. The majority of SC "10-57" calls turn out to be fireworks. People around here sure love their illegal aerial (!) fireworks.
I know this from listening to the scanner regularly.
Under the circumstances, I think this is an excellent, clear-headed point that more of us should meditate upon :) . Could we all try to please upvote this to the top.
EDIT: Comments below me that are pointing out that this is a big deal as far as MIT is concerned....... please refer to the OP's full remarks (and michaelochurch's addendum). I'll highlight a small point from OP's remark:
>> After all, "shots fired" is not an uncommon thing in many cities in the US.
^^^That^^^. I am pretty sure it is unique and uncommon for wherever it is currently happening. I empathise with people there, and honest to God, for someone not from the USA, I would be pretty freaked out if I were to be living there.
But on the whole gun-related incidents are not that uncommon to begin with on a when viewed from County/State/Country perspective -- which the OP wants us to remember and meditate at this point.
P.S: There were some Coursera course(s) also, that actually tackle this point more scientifically. But, now is not the time to be Spock!
EDIT 2: Ahh, I just noticed the timeline on those comments, they are older than my comment. Ooops. I'll let my comments stand, as I feel they summarise the OP's point in some detail, but letting people know, I am aware of my small faux-paus.
FWIW there have been other shootings in Boston since the marathon. They've just been in places like Dudley Square that the national media don't care about. At least five people were shot in Boston on Wednesday night.
http://www.universalhub.com/crime/20130417-night-bloodshed-t...
There is something a bit perverse about the disparity in the media attention given to violence that occurs north of the Mass Pike versus south of the Pike.
I see from the report that they are urging people to stay away from 32 specifically. Can anyone clarify if they have someone trapped inside the building, or are they just trying to keep people away from the police net?
"MIT officer was shot and firearm was stolen. No suspect description, no direction of flight, happened about 45 minutes ago, was an MIT officer, is at Mass General now."
If this had involved known suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, there would probably have been a small platoon of federal officers involved. The officer in this instance is MIT police.
"There was a shooting at 32 Vassar St... No suspect description... No direction of flight..." MIT officer was shot and weapon stolen, I think they said the weapon was recovered. Officer is at MGH. Witness in lobby of Stata saw man in cowboy hat.
(All that on the police scanner in the last minute or so)
A university police officer has died after being shot on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge late Thursday, according to state police.
It may or may not be connected, but police in Boston have surrounded two men who are exchanging automatic gunfire them and have thrown grenades, another officer down. The grenades have been mentioned repeatedly, it's not 'I think I heard.'
Watertown is the next town over, and just up the road from where they filled up with fuel after carjacking... so, yeah, looks like it might be very related.
I heard the carjacking reported on scanner while the MIT standoff was still going on, and there was a pretty short time between police at the MIT incident switching channels and some frantic-sounding talk from police following up on LoJack's report that the stolen car was in Watertown. So I'm inclined to believe these are two separate things.
The carjacking victim reported that they'd been driving around for about half an hour before he escaped at a gas station. Time's arrow beats proximity.
I see the place where the carjacker escaped, an area I know pretty well. They must have been driving around in circles for a long time. There's no way it takes 30 minutes to get that far at night in Cambridge.
Watertown is 10-15 minutes away from MIT. It seems likely that they were connected, given that there was a carjacking ~2 minutes away from MIT in Cambridge.
Note: the carjacking happened in the same direction from MIT as Watertown.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadMIT issued an emergency alert at 10:48 on Monay night reporting shots fired on the university campus. The school newspaper reports, "Shots fired near 32 Vassar St (Stata Center), police officer down. Please stay inside." For now, details are scarce, but the suspect is on the loose and considered armed and extremely dangerous.
This is a developing story. We'll update you as new information comes in.
While things like a gunman on campus is most certainly an emergency, these systems also serve other messages. Things like other emergencies (earthquakes, for example), snow days, we're just testing the emergency alarms today, etc.
Edit because I had another thought: the whole field of emergency preparedness in higher education is rather fascinating. Most of what I found interesting I had heard second-hand from clients, but you might find it quite interesting.
Text messages during emergencies? Not a chance. Not when they don't even work for a simple test (hour delays!)
You ask yourself how people dealt with large-scale civil emergencies before cellphones became widespread. There were such things as warning sirens, and of course the police with loudspeaker vans. They are still doing that today - every time a hurricane is set to hit Miami the emergency services make the rounds of low-lying areas to get the word out to the homeless.
And a gunman or shooter on campus just cannot be hid - people shout warnings, someone will alert the police, who will then cordon off the area. The costs for the messaging system are obvious, high, and altogether the thing appears more like ass-covering for the administration than something that has tangible benefits.
So you'd have to deducted the people killed in making sites like these first. So a web site is possibly $40,000. A humans life in the US is probably worth around $2,000,000. So it might cost one 50th of a humans life to create a site like this.
I'd guess not, but the figures are complicated, the site is used for other things for starters.
I'd suspect a suicide help line would be better money spent. Don't drink and drive campaigns, healthy eating, quitting smoking help all far better returns I'd guess.
This is not what can be produced in the average human life, which is probably more like $1 million as I estimated recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5543848 . Instead, it's how much it costs to save a human life on the margin, which is the applicable number here.
2. My impression from previous things I've read is that suicide lines are largely ineffective.
Obviously there are huge differences between humans.
Still I agree with you. Have a couple of upvotes. You can put a dollar value on a human life but it doesn't really cover it. Life is more than dollars and cents.
You cannot compare 'human lives' by comparing dollars. And surely, the site does not "cost" one 50th of "a" human life.
According to Wikipedia -- $6-7M per life in the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life
I wonder if someone would be brave enough to even predict these figures.
I just wonder whether we will look back in 12 months time at the "week of hell" and realise that it was actually just a week in which we found all the things that usually go on every week that we don't hear about.
So this is a bit meatier a problem.
lots more details
There is a serious problem with HN when stories like this get so many up-votes. This story is against the site guidelines. There isn't anything deeply interesting in the comments.
They do have several hundred non-violent crimes per year.
And HN should care - Stata is full of CS people.
Edit: dates
I'd like to tell you what happened next, but I got down on the floor until the commotion ended.
But yes, this was not a common occurrence.
"On campus" is kind of a more vague thing with MIT than with some other schools, since it was in the 1990s and before a very open campus in the middle of a city, with a few major roads running through it.
That being said, there are more objective measures we could use, such as "made The Tech" (outside the police log), which this already has.
http://tech.mit.edu/V123/N17/17shooting.17n.html
The worst part is it happened during pre-frosh weekend, when admitted high school students were invited to visit and experience MIT for a few days.
The mid-April week has always had a higher-than-normal rate of manic-type (e.g. spree killings) violence, and there are a lot of theories about it (spring inciting grandeur in unstable men) but no one knows why. Those are very rare, high-visibility events, though. Overall, that time is no more dangerous than any other. (There's only about a +/- 5 percent seasonal difference in violent crime, with summer and December being the worst).
Has it really gotten a lot safer. not counting this unique sort of incident?
http://www.universalhub.com/crime/dorchester.html http://www.universalhub.com/crime/roxbury.html
(I have family in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan)
Generally speaking, the areas around MIT and Harvard are relatively safe, although muggings and petty theft aren't unheard of. Things have been a lot better since they cleaned up Central Square in the 1990's.
Note that the following link only include incidents in which bullets actually hit people. http://www.bpdnews.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Shooting...
This does not, of course, include justifiable homicides.
ETA: So as not to scare anyone remember that in major cities typically between 65% and 91% of murder victims are criminals, and most of the killings are gang related.
I've never even heard a gunshot, and I don't know anyone who ever has.
Generally, Americans do the "Out of sight, out of mind" thing when they hear about violence. They only care when it's happening in situations where they could see themselves.
Kid gets shot walking on the sidewalk in inner-city Camden for wearing the wrong color shirt? Meh, he was probably a gangbanger anyway.
Kid gets shot in Cambridge? Oh no, the sky is falling.
...it is.
More accurately stated I suppose, I had previously thought I lived in a developed area.
The crowd is not "Hate America".
The Crowd is "America needs to get better". The first step to fixing problems in to acknowledge they exist.
I don't know about you, I strive for constant improvement in my life.
I'm from one of the Developed countries that ranks above the US in every major category that counts.
http://www.oecd.org/statistics/
It's always so interesting to see Americans who interpret "make it better" as "taking pot shots"
What's so inherently wrong with admitting there are problems and working towards improving them?
I am quite pro-gun (remember the part about growing up around a lot of responsible gun owners?), but you making the kind of comments that make me strongly reconsider identifying that way. Hurling insults around does not contribute to the discussion; it is just childish and makes you look desperate.
Of course, as jlgreco pointed out, you're only showing your ignorance to the topic and hand by trying to deflect the real issue with insults at me. It's shocking/hilarious/sad you need to resort to that, instead of actually addressing the issue at hand.
If you compare stats for all the factors that really make a difference for quality of life for the average person on the street (healthcare, education, death rates, crime rates, pollution, safety, etc. just to name a few), you'll see America is very often comparable to developing nations, and not often comparable to developed nations. In many cases, it's staggering far behind the best in the world.
Food for thought.
Although, I've been there couple of times, yes I totally agree with you. A couple of times in my visit, gun shots plus/followed by siren wails in the distance have had the combined effect of inducing sleepless nights and prayer-mode in me, many times. :-)
I know, I know... crossing the street, swimming, etc., all carry equal risks, but for a lot of people like me, "rat-a-tat" and "bang-bang-kapwing" is great, as long as it is seen on comic books, films and cheesy batman TV serials.
People outside the US have this image of people dodging bullets left and right as they walk down the street.
Then again, I grew up in a very rural area, but guns are - from my perspective - an absolutely routine, normal, everyday part of life. I guess that's why I find it so hard to "get" the mindset of the radical antigunners here, who act like guns are intrinsically "evil" and seem to think that a gun can pick itself up off a table and go out and shoot somebody.
I know this from listening to the scanner regularly.
Like so many things, "it depends".
EDIT: Comments below me that are pointing out that this is a big deal as far as MIT is concerned....... please refer to the OP's full remarks (and michaelochurch's addendum). I'll highlight a small point from OP's remark:
>> After all, "shots fired" is not an uncommon thing in many cities in the US.
^^^That^^^. I am pretty sure it is unique and uncommon for wherever it is currently happening. I empathise with people there, and honest to God, for someone not from the USA, I would be pretty freaked out if I were to be living there.
But on the whole gun-related incidents are not that uncommon to begin with on a when viewed from County/State/Country perspective -- which the OP wants us to remember and meditate at this point.
P.S: There were some Coursera course(s) also, that actually tackle this point more scientifically. But, now is not the time to be Spock!
EDIT 2: Ahh, I just noticed the timeline on those comments, they are older than my comment. Ooops. I'll let my comments stand, as I feel they summarise the OP's point in some detail, but letting people know, I am aware of my small faux-paus.
This is the article they link to: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/mit-lockdown-after-reports-ar...
MIT has NOT called off the lock down yet: http://emergency.mit.net/
There is something a bit perverse about the disparity in the media attention given to violence that occurs north of the Mass Pike versus south of the Pike.
Manually transcribed from police scanner: http://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/6254/web
(All that on the police scanner in the last minute or so)
Kinda feels weird sitting in Jamaica listening to the police scanner around MIT.
Kinda awesome too - I know the tech is simple...but actually experiencing it, gives you this "world is small" feeling.
I wonder how that could be arranged.
https://twitter.com/JoeXu/status/325086354176364545/photo/1
A university police officer has died after being shot on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge late Thursday, according to state police.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/18/us/cambridge-gunshots/index.ht...
http://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/6254/web via Reddit.
:-/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...
https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=200082141349599835237.0...
Note: the carjacking happened in the same direction from MIT as Watertown.
EDIT: And officer down. That's been confirmed again.
EDIT 2: Two suspects down, one sent to hospital.
Holy shit... WTF is going on up there?!?
Update: One suspect in custody
http://static.dnaindia.com/images/cache/1824279.jpg
Brief video:
https://vine.co/v/bUigVwhlIhq