Well. . . a backpack left in a crowd minutes before it explodes is asking a lot of the police or the public, it’s not as visible or as strange looking as a bunch of blinking lights, for all a cop would know that backpack belongs to the person standing next to it. In fact Jeff Bauman, the guy who lost both legs in the blast, saw Tsarnaev drop the bag next to him and didn’t think anything of it at the time.
There have been many other bomb scares where it turned out to be a misplaced book bag with someone’s school work inside, seems like they’re in the news all the time since 9/11. There’s no ideal response for something like this. They either overreact for every lost suitcase and purse, or they let one through because it looks so banal. The world is imperfect.
What I found maddening in the aftermath of the Marathon bombing was that Goodwill stopped selling pressure cookers-- “this could be made into a bomb” they said. “But I can go to Target right now and buy a brand new one, you know that right? Are you going to stop selling backpacks too?”
Boston wins the award for the most high profile overreaction to a non-bomb, but this kind of thing goes on everywhere now.
