I don’t like to make broad crit­i­cisms of the police because their job is a hard one and the con­tri­bu­tions they make to soci­ety are over­all pretty pos­i­tive. But boy are they hav­ing a hard time decid­ing what threats look like! Let’s take a look at some recent examples:

Jan­u­ary 2007: Police shut down large parts of the city to dis­man­tle 38 mag­netic signs with blink­ing lights in the shape of a car­toon char­ac­ter, arrest­ing two peo­ple and claim­ing, in the ensu­ing media cir­cus, that the signs were “hoax devices” which had a “sin­is­ter appear­ance,” bat­ter­ies, and wires. Oh my!

Feb­ru­ary 2007: Police, out of an abun­dance of cau­tion, blow up a traf­fic counter that had been installed by the traf­fic department.

Sep­tem­ber 2007: Police arrest an MIT stu­dent at machine-gun point after she appears at the air­port wear­ing a sweat­shirt with blink­ing lights on it. They later claim that they were close to killing her. Rather than apol­o­giz­ing, they sue her, but don’t drop the charges until after more than a year of post­pone­ments and legal wran­gling that forces her to drop out of school.

March 2009: Police mis­take a man­nequin tied to the front door of a Bank of Amer­ica branch for a bomb, but real­ize their error after about 90 minutes.

April 2009: Police mis­take a painted con­crete lump for a real bomb, even after some­one explains that it’s just an adver­tise­ment for a MIT Bur­ton 3rd Bombers party. They spend four hours “dis­abling” it.

In all of the above sit­u­a­tions, a lit­tle com­mon sense should have pre­vailed over the mind­less exe­cu­tion of anti-terrorist train­ing. The ques­tion this begs is hard: are the police suf­fer­ing from a badly bro­ken insti­tu­tional cul­ture, or are they just really, really clueless?