The young woman you see to the right was a journalism student at Emerson College. She was a Boston Red Sox fan. She was bright, attractive, and by all accounts on her way to great things. She was 21. Was. Now she’s on a slab, thanks to an overzealous Boston police officer.

An important win by the Sox led, as important wins or losses often do, to a riot. Kids scaled the rafters of the “Green Monster”, climbed up on signs, set small fires, and generally made asses of themselves. Police arrived on horseback just in time to make things much, much worse than they might have been.

Apparently, one particularly unpleasant kid refused to leave the area after being ordered out by a police officer. Enraged at the youth’s contempt, the officer grabbed him by the back of his shirt and threw him to the ground. Others, seeing this brutality, began hurling bottles and other debris at the officers. It’s interesting how sometimes, all it takes is a bit of contempt to turn a person sworn to uphold the law into someone determined to uphold his own ego.

One cop began firing what are sometimes called non-lethal projectiles into the crowd. These were plastic balls filled with pepper-like spray, designed to shatter on impact. They’re designed to be fired low, but the officer shot into the crowd at eye level, apparently in an indiscriminate way. Victoria “Torie” Snelgrove was standing by a hot dog cart with friends, not part of the altercation and not involved in anything other than conversation. When the officer fired into the crowd, she was hit directly in the eye with a projectile. She went down, bleeding profusely.

Friends tended to her as she lost, regained, lost consciousness. A cop, not the one who fired the projectile, briefly checked on her and then left. Someone called an ambulance. Five minutes after being hit, she was taken to a hospital.

The “non-lethal” projectile inflicted a lethal injury. She died hours later. The Boston police commissioner, in a stunning emotional response, spoke today and said, essentially, “Gee, maybe we shouldn’t use those things anymore.”

The recent ubiquitousness of video cameras has shown us a side of law enforcement most of us aren’t keen to see. We have seen deadly, out-of-control police chases kill people and destroy property, solely to catch someone guilty of speeding or driving a stolen car. We have seen police beat people to death with wooden clubs for the crime of vagrancy. We’ve watched people shot with tasers, and we’ve heard about a few of them dying mysteriously, hours or days later. We’ve watched the Philadelphia Police serve their version of an eviction notice on some extremists living in a row house: a bomb, dropped by helicopter. (That one was a long time ago, but I still get visions of Philadelphia Police cruisers driving around with little row-houses painted on the front fenders.) On the other end of the spectrum, every day I see taxpayer-owned police cars being driven at unsafe speeds and in an unsafe manner for no apparent reason. At every level, our police are in many cases completely out of control.

Will this young woman’s death finally bring this situation to the attention of the public, the only people who are empowered to actually do something about it? I wish I could think so.