Focus on ‘flash parties’
Hub cops target illegal bashes hyped by social media
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
By:
John Zaremba
Hub kids are breaking into vacant homes and using social media to hype instant “flash parties” that attract armed troublemakers and can turn into violent mob scenes that terrorize neighbors, a Herald review found.
Cops in Dorchester and Mattapan are telling residents to watch out for the fly-by-night bashes — which, thanks to smartphones and super-portable DJ equipment, have become the latest tech-driven twist in the city’s ongoing war against the public-safety scourge of illegal house parties.
The Herald reviewed several cases, including:
• A Nov. 9 party on Theodore Street in Mattapan where the host broke into the first floor of a triple-decker. When cops arrived, partiers panicked and someone threw a woman’s purse out an open window. Police say they found it and recovered a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol with the serial number “obliterated.”
• A Dec. 29 bash on Blue Hill Avenue where the host, an evicted tenant, broke into his old home, posted about it on Facebook at about midnight and had more than 200 people partying within the hour.
• A Dec. 2 nightclub-style party, also on Blue Hill Avenue, where the organizers decked out a staff in matching uniforms and even patted down guests before admitting them inside — to a dirt-floor basement.
“(They’re) putting between 150 and 300 kids in an apartment, with no security and sometimes no lights,” said Boston police Sgt. Detective John Fitzgerald, a former drug-unit and gang-unit cop who heads the party crackdown in the BPD’s Mattapan district. “That ends up in fights, weapons, and the people who go to these parties know what they’re all about, so they bring some sort of weapon just to protect themselves.
“That’s why we don’t want to let these things go down,” Fitzgerald said, “because once they bring these guns to the party, that can be tragic for us.”
The discovery of a gun at the Theodore Street bash shocked Keyisha Horton, who lives on the third floor of the building with four kids and a grandchild. She remembers cops breaking up the party but never knew one of the guests was packing heat.
“That’s crazy. That’s just so sad,” Horton, 38, said. “Anybody could have died. I could have been walking past that, going out if I’d felt like it. I could have been dead. And my kids would have nothing.”
Police arrested the DJ and another man for trespassing; their cases were dismissed in December and January after they performed community service — 24 hours for the DJ, 20 for the other man — according to records on file at Dorchester District Court.
Cops say crashing house parties early — before crowds get too big, before uninvited guests get turned away, before feuding partiers find one another there — prevents them from turning into hotbeds of violence.
Boston police Capt. Joseph Boyle, who runs the Mattapan district, credits Fitzgerald’s team with helping cut shootings in the district from 69 in 2012 to 50 last year.
“It’s really become not only the violent crime, but seriously a quality-of-life issue,” Boyle said. “John’s done a great job, and we’ve really made a lot of friends and allies in the community.” |
