“To do this kind of placement of devices the way it was, an individual had to know or should have that it was going to create the kind of panic it did,” Coakley said last night during a press conference.
I thought I heard there were 9 other cities involved in this promotion. Havent heard from them, looks like Boston is the only city to overreact, and now they are embarassed and mad darn it!
Perhaps they just sent a police car out to investigate and removed the signs without triggering a massive response. It would have been nice if Boston had done the same.
But it is certainly forseeable that a large city police force would react as Boston's did. In fact, that reaction (or over-reaction, if you are so inclined) greatly increased the value of the marketing campaign. Millions of people know about this stupid cartoon today who never heard of it yesterday.
When somebody greatly profits from a predictable result of their actions, it is reasonable to suspect that they took the action in order to cause the predictable response and profit greatly, don't you think?