I think they just wanted to blow something up.
Every time I hear about one of these overreactions by the police I can’t help but think of the crime scene in Alice’s Restaurant.
And that’s what we did, sat in the back of the patrol car and drove to the
quote Scene of the Crime unquote. I want tell you about the town of
Stockbridge, Massachusets, where this happened here, they got three stop
signs, two police officers, and one police car, but when we got to the
Scene of the Crime there was five police officers and three police cars,
being the biggest crime of the last fifty years, and everybody wanted to
get in the newspaper story about it. And they was using up all kinds of
cop equipment that they had hanging around the police officer’s station.
They was taking plaster tire tracks, foot prints, dog smelling prints, and
they took twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles
and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each
one was to be used as evidence against us. Took pictures of the approach,
the getaway, the northwest corner the southwest corner and that’s not to
mention the aerial photography.
A couple years ago, my paper sent me out to a suspicious bomb scare at a federal building. Every cop, sheriff and trooper was there. The bomb squad was there. Snipers were on the roof of every neighboring building. They had that guy who puts on the giant bomb suit to approach the suspicious box.
The guilty package? A pizza box with some stale slices in it…left in a dirty Fed Ex wrapper. They arrested some homeless guy for leaving it on the steps of a federal building.
I wasted four hours of my day out there, shooting footage…
Right after the famous Boston Aquateen Ad Scare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare
The BPD blew up a Department of Public Works traffic counter as a “Suspicious Device” Tax funded explosives, blowing up a piece of tax funded equipment.
As with this story, I suspect a budget justification….