FBI urges arming Boston Police with assault rifles

(NECN: Greg Wayland, Boston, Mass.) – Boston’s FBI director is urging police in the city to beef up their firepower. He believes they need more automatic weapons to meet any potential terrorist attack. But, he is facing strong opposition from the mayor and the police commissioner. Warren Bamford, the special agent in charge of the FBI in Boston, says he is baffled by opposition. In May, Boston Mayor Tom Menino criticized a proposal to arm up to 200 officers with M-16s that the police department had ordered from the U.S. military. Menino said only specialized police units should have the guns. The proposal also drew criticism from community leaders who said they were concerned about neighborhood police officers carrying assault weapons. The Boston proposal, first reported by The Boston Globe, called for arming as many as 200 patrol officers with semiautomatic assault rifles. The plan was to give specialized units, including the bomb squad and harbor patrol, the rifles first, then to give them to patrol officers in neighborhood precincts. The M-16s have a fully automatic function so they can operate like machine guns, but the Boston plan was to convert them for semiautomatic operation. Menino’s spokeswoman, Dot Joyce, said Tuesday that the mayor believes “there needs to be the availability of this type of weapon within the Boston Police Department.” Bamford said other large city police departments have made semiautomatic assault rifles widely available to officers, and Boston should, too. *Material from The Associated Press used in this report*