I saw a video at the time the police were trying to apprehend the brothers responsible for the Boston bombing and the gunfight sounded like World War II. Later I read where the police had fired something like 450 rounds in a few minutes. I also read that the only weapon the alleged bombers possessed at the time was a most likely empty 9mm pistol.

The Police bullets only grazed the throat of one of the brothers and completely missed the second, who was actually killed when his brother ran over him when escaping the Police cordon in a stolen car. A state report on the emergency response was released on Friday.

Law enforcement created “dangerous crossfire situations” while trying to apprehend the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings,it said. Further, Police officers lacked “weapons discipline” during a gun battle with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, who was killed a short time later, in the early hours of April 19, 2013.

The weapons problem also plagued officers arresting the younger brother, according to the 130-page report made public by the Massachusetts’ emergency management agency. While the first officers in the Watertown gun-battle used their weapons appropriately, others later improperly self-deployed to the scene without assignments, the report said.

“Additional officers arriving on scene near the conclusion of the firefight fired weapons toward the vicinity of the suspects, without necessarily having identified and lined up their target or appropriately aimed their weapons,” the report said.

The report does not say whether it was a Tsarnaev brother or police who fired the shot that wounded transit police officer Richard Donahue during the gun battle. Local media reported the Middlesex District Attorney’s office was expected to release a report on the shooting within two months.

Similar mistakes were made in the effort to arrest Tsarnaev after a 911 call reported him in the boat. In trying to capture Tsarnaev, an officer fired his weapon without authority, “causing many officers to fire at the boat in the belief that they were being shot at by the suspect,” the report said.

Still, the report concludes that law enforcement’s response to the bombings was “a great success.”

If that’s what they call a success, I’d hate to see a failure. I didn’t like this operation when I saw hordes of jack booted government thugs searching people’s homes without warrant. I thought at the time they were probably a band of incompetents.

Sounds as if I was right, and this operation could have been handled a lot better and much more professionally. Like the two cowards should have been shot by accurate and measured fire that night and saved the taxpayer a few million in legal process costs.