Updated. Frightened people eagerly exchange freedom for security, even false security. That’s the only explanation for the willingness of at least a million people in the Boston area to lock themselves in their homes because a wounded 19-year-old fugitive was on the loose in the suburbs west of the city. In effect, the fugitive was free while honest, law abiding, citizens were under house arrest until the lockdown was lifted as evening began.
Whether the authorities actually had the legal authority to issue and enforce such a sweeping curtailment of civil liberties is one question.
A second question is whether the lockdown made any difference outside the few blocks where the fugitive was thought to be hiding. I doubt it did. People going about their daily round may make it harder for police to spot a fugitive, but the police cannot be everywhere and would gain from having the eyes and ears of the crowd on duty in the street.
Update. But now we know they would have so gained. Thanks to the lockdown, the capture and arrest of Dzokhar Tsarnaev probably was delayed by twelve hours. Boston police commissioner Edward Davis explained what happened:
A man had gone out of his house after being inside the house all day, abiding by our request to stay inside. He walked outside and saw blood on the boat in the backyard. He then opened the tarp on the top of the boat and looked in and saw a man covered with blood.
A third question is how long the lockdown — a term I associate with maximum security prisons — can be sustained without doing serious economic and social damage. The answer: approximately half a day. People need to earn money, buy groceries and medicine, send their children to school, and continue with life unafraid.
In the greater Boston area, the probability that anyone would encounter the fugitive was extremely low, probably lower than the probability of having a fender-bender during the evening rush hour. Yet the authorities behaved as through the entire city was in terrible danger, in effect telling Bostonians they were in grave danger of being shot between their eyes if they stuck their heads out their front door.
This was panic — well intentioned, but still panic — by law enforcement and political leaders, a lockdown of the brains of public officials, and an unnecessary, probably illegal, and as events proved, counterproductive curtailment of civil liberties.