And all night long they had the lights on and were dutifully giving every passerby the finger. Their purpose was clear, if obnoxious. In the morning, they shut themselves off, and they were found, identified as suspicious and removed within and hour or two.
I don't know what level of omnipresence you expect out of the Boston Police Department. But finding and removing nine items in random locations within a couple of hours sounds like a pretty good performance to me. Certainly nothing to be ashamed of.
Not hours. They had been in place for weeks.
What does that have to do with your assertion that they were intended to draw out the bomb squads and shut down Boston? Especially when all the police needed to do was perform a little police work (you know, a phone call or two) to discover what they were and who placed them...and then have THEM remove them. Instead what we saw was panic and chaos created by city officials who APPARENTLY did no investigative work whatsoever. And now those officials want to CTAs (having been exposed as total boobs) by transferring the blame to the cartoon network.
Meantime, I'm still trying to figure out the logic of a terrorist who would go around at night in plain view with cameras rolling placing neon lit bombs. "Hey you there, look at me, I'm a neon lit bomb, call the authorities."