Are 'Lockdowns' the New Standard?

There's no shortage of good reasons why the FBI, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, the governments of Boston, Cambridge, Watertown, and every other law enforcement agency involved in Friday's daylong manhunt didn't telegraph their strategies or decision-making processes to the public. Among the most obvious: At one point the Boston Police Department's Twitter feed put out a specific plea to the media not to broadcast the locations of tactical units, lest alleged marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev be tipped off how best to evade them, or worse yet, to attack.

But now that the immediate threats to public safety posed by these two brothers have subsided, there's a lot more we still need to know about the strategic discussions that contributed to the decision to ask residents to "shelter in place" throughout most of the Boston metro area for 13 hours, as well as the decision to lift it before the suspect was caught. If for no other reason, each and every U.S. mayor and governor is now asking themselves the same question: If and when this happens in my city or state, is the "lock down" approach now the only politically palatable option?