I would rather the police be cautious about something like this rather than ignoring it.
No doubt you think I am silly. Fine with me. I don't watch cartoons for entertainment, either. I'm not very cool..
http://www.siri-us.com/IEDBrief.ppt#1
here is a reasonable brief on what IEDs look like, plus I have another at #602
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1776926/posts?page=602#602
I understand that, but there's a difference between thinking that a boxish object that contains some volume of some unknown material might be a bomb, and a device like this which consists of a single flat panel with four D cell Duracell batteries attached.
My point is that there's no place for the explosive material to go.
While the average Police officer might have only a little better idea of what may or may not be a bomb than the average person, somewhere along the line of this escalating from a person calling the police because they were suspicions of the object, and shutting down a considerable part of the city for hours, someone who had much better knowledge about bombs should have been able to look at it, and figure out that it wasn't a threat.
I'm not saying that it's that unreasonable for somewhat paranoid person to have called the police to investigate this. It's not even that unreasonable for the responding officers to report in that they don't know what it is, and that could unfortunately result in a bit of an overreaction and the bomb squad having to respond and investigate.
However, somewhere along the line of these being reported all over town, someone would have had to have said, are you sure these are bombs? These things have been there for weeks. Why do we suspect them of being bombs?
What part is supposed to blow up? The batteries? The flat sign? The LEDs?
It's simply not reasonable for the politicians and administrators in Boston to be blaming this advertising effort for their overreaction.
Now the politicians in Boston are calling for criminal and civil penalties against these people who didn't do anything wrong. They are accusing them of felony acts and confiscating their property, as well as having city governments in other large cities confiscate them as well.
If it wasn't for the fact that this will probably work in the favor of the cartoon and the advertising company in the long run, they would very likely have a good case to sue Boston for even more money than they already wasted on the police response.
The politicians are embarrassed about how they handled the issue, so as usual they have to push the blame onto someone else and threaten and abuse their authority to threaten them into issuing an apology and accepting the blame in the eyes of much of the public.
No doubt you think I am silly. Fine with me. I don't watch cartoons for entertainment, either. I'm not very cool..
I don't think what you said is silly. I agree with it.
However, being cautious and investigating it is far different than letting this situation get completely out of control, shutting down the city, and then blaming the owners of these signs for the overreaction, including threatening criminal prosecution.
Otherwise we're going to end up shutting down cities and criminally prosecuting people for putting up Christmas decorations.
Some level of common sense must be exercised, and some checks must be in place to keep a little suspicions from shutting down cities.