It has been a violent, perilous, and bloody few days for the men and women charged with keeping order in our neighborhood. On Tuesday, three Boston Police officers were shot and wounded and the man who fired on them was killed inside an apartment on Ferndale Street near Codman Square after an hours-long standoff.  The officers are being treated for non-life-threatening injuries, although Boston Police interim Superintendent Gregory Long characterized the injuries as “serious.”

The incident began on Tuesday morning around 9:30 after police were called to a six-family house on the street for a report of a man threatening other residents with a gun. Long said later that police had engaged in negotiations with the man, who had barricaded himself in a third-floor apartment.

Gunfire erupted inside the property around 3:30 p.m. and the three officers who were wounded were transported to local hospitals. Long said that the gunman, who has not yet been identified, was shot multiple times and was pronounced dead at the scene.

District Attorney Rachael Rollins, speaking from the scene on Ferndale Street on Tuesday evening, said that her office would be conducting an investigation into the incident, following protocols for police-involved shootings.

Rollins noted that Tuesday’s incident was the second in three days in which Boston Police have been met with violence. A Boston Police officer was stabbed in the neck while responding to a domestic violence call at a home on Ingleside Street in Dorchester on Saturday night. The assailant in that incident was also shot and killed by police.

A separate, but nonetheless bizarre scene unfolded as DA Rollins spoke at the Ferndale Street crime scene on Tuesday evening. As she attempted to brief the media— and, therefore, the public— on the latest facts in the case, one person off to the side of the press conference began haranguing Rollins, screaming at her to the point that she had to— on several occasions— stop talking.

The heckler was not a resident of Ferndale Street or anywhere close to Tuesday’s incident. He was Joao DePina, a provocateur and failed candidate for city council who has been banned and suspended from social media platforms for harassing both private and public figures.  Whatever his most recent grievances are with Rollins, DePina’s behavior on Tuesday— broadcast live across the region on television— was a form of vandalism, interrupting the dissemination of information. DePina’s rantings were not related to the day’s awful events on Ferndale Street and were certainly not representative of the good people of Codman Square.

Another nuisance that manifested itself amid the rapidly unfolding events on Tuesday hovered hundreds of feet above Codman Square and neighboring sections of Dorchester. Several helicopters connected to news organizations responded to the scene of the quadruple shooting— and stayed for hours, well after darkness fell.

The journalist Michael Jonas, a nearby resident. noted that after a certain amount of time, there is no longer news value to establishing the scene of the events, long after they had unfolded. Instead, the cacophony of low-flying, noisy aircraft, he suggested, just made the trauma worse for people who live here.

He’s right. News organizations should use better judgment in deploying helicopters for long hours above our community on occasions like this. We hope our friends in broadcast news will take that critique under advisement.

In the meantime, we can all be grateful that the officers injured over the last week will survive their brushes with lethal force. We are grateful to them for their service to the city.