This documentary is in the stellar by any means, but it does give you a basic grounding of what happened during the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon. I take away from it two conclusions, that the pair of terrorists, two brothers who were the children of Chechen immigrants, were incompetent as terrorists and unfortunately the police chasing them were equally incompetent. Why do I think the terrorists were incompetent? They spent a great deal of time trying to construct bombs to kill and meme the most amount of people, and despite placing the bombs in a very crowded area, they initially only (thankfully) murdered three people and maimed a great deal more. If they had to just use the gun and started shooting they would have killed a lot more people, as America's problems with school shootings can attest. Then later they murdered someone because they were trying to steal his gun but didn't realize that gun holsters have security features which can prevent someone from stealing a gun and so this murder was completely unnecessary. They then hijacked a car and when the owner of the car escaped they didn't realize that they could be tracked using GPS. Then in a confrontation with the police they were separated, and the younger brother actually drove over the older brother and killed him. So in this horrible terrorist attack he killed four people, and one was his own brother. But why do I say the police were incompetent? Well, generally it was a lack of coordination - photos depicting the assailants were leaked to the Press and this caused an escalation of the situation. When the stolen vehicle was found the police who found it just thought that it was a carjacking and not a pair of highly armed terrorists, and several other police agencies responded to the scene and there was a large firefight within a Suburban neighborhood, and it was lucky no bystanders were killed by flying bullets in their houses. This is somewhat forgivable because things were moving at a very quick pace at this point. But then one of the terrorists managed to escape, and there was a citywide manhunt for him. He was found hiding in a boat that was covered by a tarp and the tarp was covered in blood. He was quickly surrounded, when an officer thought that he saw a gun and shot, then the other 30 or 40 officers surrounding the boat also shot at the boat for 2 or 3 minutes before the situation was controlled, and a ceasefire was ordered. The suspect did not have a gun, and it was very lucky he wasn't shot. You might be saying, why does it matter if he was shot or not he's a terrorist? Well, at this point they didn't know that it was only two brothers who had arranged this attack, they thought maybe it could be a larger terrorist group. And also, again, these shots were fired in the middle of a suburban neighborhood. One police officer was shot during the previous confrontation, most likely by friendly fire and killed. In the melee that surrounded the boat there were police officers who were not on duty who volunteered to arrive at the scene which seems like such a breakdown in the chain of command. One only hopes that their training has been updated, and that these problems would not happen in a similar future emergency.
