Was Boston Actually on Lockdown?



........When it came to keeping the public off the streets on Friday, an order, it seems, wasn’t needed. “When the governor suggested in light of last night’s events that we have an armed subject on the loose who is very dangerous, who has committed murder, I believe the citizens of the commonwealth, in the hopes of helping law enforcement, voluntarily stayed off the streets,” Massachusetts State Trooper Todd Nolan told TIME. “This is a request that the public stay inside and they are adhering to it. There has been no law mentioned or any idea that if you went outside you’d be arrested.”

Legal experts agree that the request has been effective. “If there’s a person running around with explosives in a major population center, it wouldn’t be that surprising that the response of authorities would be to ask people to not be outside,” says David Barron, a professor of public law at Harvard Law School. The heightened risk to the public, given the violence that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is already alleged to have inflicted, made officials feel the shelter in place request was necessary, but such measures might not be the standard response to every future terrorism manhunt. “If the idea is somehow that the model for how to respond–when there’s any kind of suspect on the loose related to terrorism, they’ll be telling a place to be completely shut down–that seems not at all likely,” Barron says.



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