It’s all over the news.  Some marketing company promoting a late-night cartoon on the Cartoon Network placed a bunch of blinking lighted signs around Boston, causing the police to call out the bomb squads and block off major parts of the city. Now the police have arrested two of the sign installers and are calling for the heads of Cartoon Network and Turner Broadcasting executives. Translation: We are so embarassed that we didn’t know the difference between a battery and a bomb that we have to make more out of this than common sense dictates.

Nine other cities dealt with the signs without creating a furor. In fact, some of them did nothing about the signs until Boston converted them into a security crisis. Apparently cooler heads are running the police departments of those cities. I can understand that a large city woldn’t want people going around sticking up lighted signs wherever they like. Fining the perpetrators might be in order, but arresting the lowest level hired help won’t be an effective deterrent.

While I do believe that Boston overreacted, there is at least one question that authorities need to try to answer: Is the marketing company itself responsible for the frantic calls from citizens about the signs? Did they calculate that this would be a cheap way to gain a lot of publicity for the show even if they or Turner had to pay a fine? The signs were in place in Boston and the other cities for a couple of weeks before the reaction.