> 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.