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Boston FBI head: Police need assault rifles in case of terror attack

E-mail|Link|Comments () August 18, 2009 03:17 PM

By Jonathan Saltzman and Maria Cramer, Globe Staff

The top FBI agent in Boston said today that the Menino administration should revive a controversial plan to arm neighborhood officers with semiautomatic assault rifles, saying the scarcity of such weapons on the force makes Boston more vulnerable to a terrorist attack similar to the 2008 rampage in Mumbai, India, that killed 166 people.

Special agent in charge Warren T. Bamford

Warren T. Bamford, the special agent in charge of the FBI field office in Boston, said other big cities in the United States have made such weapons widely available to specially trained police officers and that the issue "should be revisited sooner rather than later" in Boston.

"There's no imminent threats," Bamford said in a meeting with Globe editors and reporters. But, he continued, "All things being equal, if a terrorist decides, 'OK, we're going to do something like what took place in Mumbai,' well, where would you go? If you have a choice of a metropolitan city, would I go to New York, with 40,000 police officers, would I go Los Angeles, with 8,000, or would I go to Boston, with 3,500 ... and I know there's no assault rifles in the Boston Police Department?"

Bamford said he had spoken with Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis about the plan to distribute assault rifles but not with Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

In May, the Boston police prepared to arm as many as 200 patrol officers with semiautomatic rifles in specialized units such as the bomb squad and harbor patrol. The police had obtained 200 M-16s free of charge from the US military.

But community leaders decried the plan, and Menino said he would not approve it. He said he had not been briefed on the proposal until shortly before it was unveiled and that he was unhappy about the idea of officers patrolling the city's neighborhoods with such weapons.

The Rev. William E. Dickerson II, pastor at Greater Love Tabernacle in Dorchester, said today he does not support increasing the number of assault weapons for officers.

"I haven’t heard a good argument yet why we need them," he said.

Police would have to meet with community officials to explain in detail why they would need such heavy artillery, Dickerson said, adding that assault rifles could unnecessarily frighten residents.

"If I saw an officer with that gun, I would think, man, there must be something going down that we don’t know about for them to be taking it to that level," Dickerson said.