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Do you really have to make me feel old?
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Wasn’t Boston also the place where someone got arrested at gunpoint for wearing a shirt with blinking LEDs at the airport, then charged with terrorism offences so the whole thing would look like her fault instead of a near-deadly overreaction by clueless dipshit cops? I don’t remember which incident came first, but either way you’d think somebody would have learned something in time for the second one.
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I saw one of these at night about a week before; I think it was on the I-93 off ramp just past Bunker Hill CC / Prison Point Bridge.
At night it was clear what these were from a distance. In the day time, looking at them at an angle and from 15-20 ft below, they just looked like electronics packages where ones shouldn’t be. So the first say five minutes of the overreaction was forgivable. But once they got up there and got a look at it, they doubled down.
Yup. Only 8 months after the Mooninite Menace.
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Oh, but you can’t stop at blinking LED’s, you have to have a digital countdown and conveniently color-coded exposed wires. Otherwise how will everyone know it’s a bomb?
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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.
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They keep putting anniversary dates on my toys - er - collectable!
Our cops are famously, uniquely, and impressively shitty. The best thing you can say about BPD is that they don’t kill civilians as often as cops in other major cities. Instead, they just do things like build a warrantless, evidence-less, criteria-less “gang database” with private information on teenagers, regardless of any demonstrable “gang connections;” and guess which kinda schools they target with that?
There was also that time … oh yeah, this past fall! … when they nominated a new police chief, and then immediately put him on leave because he had a bunch of domestic violence charges in his history, including against his ex-wife, who was still a police officer … and, who also got busted for embezzling millions in an overtime scandal. But of course, this was all brushed under the rug by the head of the Boston Police Union … who has plausibly accused multiple times of child sexual abuse while on duty, which also got brushed under the rug.
More recenty, a bunch of anti-vax Boston cops have been harassing our new mayor (a Chinese-American woman) OUTSIDE OF HER OWN HOME. Cuz they’re definitely not racist, ya know?
Could I be worse, I suppose. The Boston Police could be the Boston FBI.
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