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Also, just to correct a bit of false information in your post..."most of Boston" wasn't shut down. It was a fairly small community in the Boston sub-burbs that was "shut down"...and even then it was really only a few blocks that they had locked down. Did you not notice the mobs of people standing at the police lines?
As my colleagues Doug Struck and Kevin Sullivan report Friday, the entire city of Boston was essentially shut down all day Friday until 6 p.m. The major universities that are the city’s lifeblood shut down. The web of buses and squealing transit cars of the oldest underground subway in the nation ground to a halt. The gleaming skyscrapers with names of insurance companies and banks in downtown Boston were lightly peopled. Stuck without any transportation, Bostonians watched televised news updates
An area that's home to nearly a million people was virtually shut down Friday as police conducted a massive manhunt for a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings. Public transit was ordered closed, bus and subway lines stopped running, and taxi service was briefly suspended in and around Boston.
The unprecedented shutdown of Boston and surrounding suburbs during the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bomber was a scary combination of an escaped killer, an on-edge community and mass communication in the social media age. “This is really a massive operation – maybe the first time that something of this size has happened.” Much of Boston and Watertown, Mass., were shut down for more than a day during the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
Initially, this only applied to Watertown and several surrounding communities and nearby areas of Boston as this was the area where Tsarnaev was, and as of right now still is, believed to be holed up. Around 9:30 in the morning, though, Boston’s Police Commissioner appeared at press conference and stated that, due to information that law enforcement had recently received, they were extending the advisory to the entire City of Boston:
"The entire city of Boston was put on lockdown Friday morning by the Massachusetts governor as police searched for the second of two men believed to have been involved in the marathon bombings earlier this week.
Gov. Deval Patrick said people should shelter in place as authorities engaged in a “massive manhunt” – an extraordinary order that affected nearly one million people. "
Of course, this answer actually raises more questions. For instance, what exactly is the Town of Montgomery’s definition of a “Code Red Alert”? What if I leave my home during this “lockdown”? Will I be ticketed? Hauled away to jail? And perhaps the biggest question: when did police acquire the right to search homes without supporting evidence? This is the same mentality which was recently on display in Boston after the April 2013 Marathon Bombings, where SWAT teams were forcing residents out of their homes at gunpoint in search of a suspected terrorist