I'm really sick of people criticizing the "lockdown" and "police state" - especially since most of it seems to be written by people from well outside of the Bos

I'm really sick of people criticizing the "lockdown" and "police state" - especially since most of it seems to be written by people from well outside of the Boston area (btw I'm writing this as someone who's bedroom is a thousand feet from where the MIT police officer was shot). The request to shelter in place was just that, a request. It was not an order, it was not illegal to go outside. The vast majority of us chose to stay inside. We made this decision because it's a) safer for us in the short term by not getting caught in the crossfire and b) safer in the long term by staying out of the way to make it easier for law enforcement to prevent these people from endangering us further. Many comparisons to other cities and other suspects at large have been presented in the last few days and all the comparisons I've seen really aren't comparable. In most cases (at least those I've seen) they either have absolutely no clue where the suspect(s) is OR they know exactly where the suspect(s) is. Boston didn't issue the shelter in place request the city Monday afternoon when they knew whoever did this was somewhere out there. They made the request four days later, AFTER they had killed a cop and engaged countless others in a scenario you rarely see outside of an action movie. They had a rough idea of where they were pretty sure he was (they were off by a block, but that's a different discussion). It's different when you have no idea where the suspect is (i.e. where we were Monday afternoon through Friday morning). It's different when you have the suspect pinned down to one specific location (and you can surround and cut off any means of escape). They removed the shelter in place request once they felt they were back to where they were (not sure where he is). We caught him, alive and with no harm to civilians. Out of towners can keep Monday morning quarterbacking this whole thing all they want as an academic exercise. But for those of us that it actually affected we're pretty damn happy (and proud) with how Friday turned out.