Of course I haven't done EOD. I don't need to be to know that bomb squads treat stuff like it's a bomb until proven otherwise via x-ray or a tech inspecting it, or it is disrupted by water cannon.
> we can only rely on common, rational, sense to debate this amongst ourselves.
"common rational sense", riiiiiight. You implied bomb techs should assume (or know) that cylinders with wires coming out of them wrapped in black plastic attached to critical transportation are just batteries and could not be a pipe full of explosives.
We're done here.
Being tightly wound must be an East-coast thing.
From the Wikipedia page on the "2007 Boston Mooninite Scare":
No devices were retrieved in Los Angeles and Lieutenant Paul Vernon of the Los Angeles Police Department stated that "no one perceived them as a threat".The many Los Angeles signs were up without incident for more than two weeks prior to the Boston scare.
Police Sergeant Brian Schmautz stated that officers in Portland had not been dispatched to remove the devices, and did not plan to unless they were found on municipal property. He added, "At this point, we wouldn't even begin an investigation, because there's no reason to believe a crime has occurred." A device was placed inside 11th Ave. Liquor on Hawthorne Boulevard in Portland, where it remains.
San Francisco Police Sergeant Neville Gittens said that Interference, Inc., was removing them, except for one found by art gallery owner Jamie Alexander, who reportedly "thought it was cool" and had it taken down after it ceased to function.
> Being tightly wound must be an East-coast thing.
To some degree, yes. Boston is just 4-5 hrs away from NYC, where just 6 years earlier two commercial passenger jets (from Boston) crashed into the WTC in the deadliest terrorist attack in US history. If you think police departments in Portland or LA felt the 9/11 attacks as acutely as such a nearby place as Boston, then you'd be mistaken.
(Please note that I'm not arguing that our freedom should go away because we need to be protected from terrorists. I'm just trying to show you the mindset of a law enforcement officer in Boston at the time, and that mindset was indeed to be suspicious of things that looked suspicious.)
As a Bostonian at the time, the last thing I wanted to do was whine about terrorism like some New Yorker. But I can see how in the bigger picture this pointed to an increased disconnect between the citizens and the police, with the BPD still aspiring to feel important like their big brothers in NYC.
At the time, the east coast culture felt very tech-backwards too. Tech was still everywhere, but as a counter / up-and-coming culture. There was a reason going to the west coast was liberating for so many. I think these two dynamics helped fuel the massive "WTF" dissonance of this incident, with the BPD coming off as a bunch of out of touch Keystone Cops massively overreacting and then just digging their ignorant heels in.
Give me a break, Lite Brites of a cartoon alien displaying a rude gesture were also placed in New York City without incident.
Ha I totally forgot they did this in multiple cities and Boston was the only place where the cops flipped out.