WASHINGTON — A former Boston police lieutenant-turned-academic slammed the law enforcement response in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings on Capitol Hill yesterday, saying civil liberties were ignored in the tense search for the suspects that brought the city to a halt.

Tom Nolan, now a criminology professor at Merrimack College, spoke during a panel on the militarization of police hosted by the American Constitution Society that I moderated.

“What we saw in that aftermath was the unilateral suspension of the United States Constitution, and particularly the Fourth Amendment,” Nolan said.

He said the house-to-house searches and use of military equipment in the April 2013 manhunt for Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, unprecedented in recent U.S. history, “was violative of the Constitution and we failed to object.”

He noted that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was ultimately apprehended not through door-to-door searches but when a resident spotted him in a boat and called 911.

“When you fail to object to what is going on now, we forfeit our right to do so in the future,” Nolan said. “Ferguson brought that into the glare of the public spotlight.”

Former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis called Nolan’s assertion “outrageous.”

“The comparison (to Ferguson) is actually insulting,” said Davis. “There have been no complaints filed, so the claim that there was some sort of constitutional violation is unsupported. It just isn’t logical.”

Davis noted police were seeking men suspected not only of killing three marathon spectators, but also executing an MIT police officer and engaging in a gunfight, with explosives, that critically injured an MBTA cop.

“They were throwing bombs at us,” Davis said. “The amount of force used by police had to be commensurate with the resistance that they are facing.”