Police describe what they knew and when they knew it

Well, then, did the Boston police department panic? Maybe they let their fears get ahead of reality.

I'm not saying they shouldn't have handled the situation the way they did, just that perhaps the speed of everything happening made them get really scared, really quickly.

Something to remember next time.

i doubt you will get any of the people who have been slamming the police to say they were wrong. these same people would have been outraged if they had not responded as seriously as they did. there have also been numerous comments about the police being out of touch in not recognizing the cartoon for what it was. i am glad the cops don't sit around watching cartoons all day.

There is a big gap in their timeline which is precisely when Turner was reported to have come clean. I'm wondering if they did so through political channels (would have made sense to them), but those channels didn't hurry that information down to the Police. If they had nothing to report, why were Patrick and Menino aiming for a 4pm press conference? Why had they already prepared statements for the press aluding to the "hoax". If this is an honest timeline and the police learned nothing from Turner or the Ad company before 4:30pm, I wonder if the fault might lie with the city/state/feds and not with Turner and the ad firm.

The BPDNews report mentions an incident in Washington DC as a relevant incident in their timeline. If you read a report of the events in Metro Fires, Threats Slow Morning Commute it sounds like DC had their own comedy of errors going on:

If communication had been clearer, he said, "it's highly probable that we would have been able to resolve the issue and not impact service."

Reports in the Globe, and elsewhere, quote Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis as saying the 'that the massive response was based partly on terrorism-related arrests earlier in the day in Britain'. Such comments do little to suggest credibility, but rather suggest a protracted exercise in covering behinds. What possible connection could a series of arrests in the UK have to do a possible explosive device in Boston? Psychic terrorists who saw the arrests coming and decided to plants bombs the other side of the Atlantic?

Deciding what information is relevant, and what is irrelevant, is a crucial skill in security and the BPD does little to inspire confidence in its ability to do this.

The lessons to be learned from the British arrests point in a different direction -- the alleged plot concerned a method (kidnapping and beheading) entirely different from previous attacks, thereby sidestepping measures solely directed against old attacks i.e. explosives. Yesterdays hoo-ha would have done nothing against this, rather it was defeated by intelligence based police work -- harder, and without the opportunity to make a lot of noise in public -- but one which has repeatedly proved effective in the UK.

The pipe bomb hoax may have been the tipping factor in an event that otherwise would have been handled more reasonably. Given an atmosphere of suspicion, everything eventually starts to look suspicious. The first box "had components consistent with improvised explosive devices," specifically "batteries, wires, magnets and other components." A lot of things are consistent with bombs to that extent, and many more things sometimes are suspected. An ice pack once caused Alewife to be closed, and a cardboard box that had been left behind once held up a train for an hour. It's hard to tell why one thing creates a panicked reaction, while something else which is just as suspicious or unsuspicious gets ignored.

At least nobody was shot by a cop. That's something.