During the event, the thing that kept coming to mind was... if the suspects actually have bombs set up, why on earth would you want to gather thousands of police officers around the scene? How many people does it take to monitor a boat to make sure no one leaves it?

But when it comes to a lockdown during a manhunt? That struck me as completely reasonable given that they (a) knew roughly where the suspects were, (b) knew they had access to explosives, and (c) didn't want to risk hurting civilians.

It's easy to play armchair police commissioner. See, I did it too right in the first paragraph. But I'm not the one calling the shots, and they did lift the lockdown when they thought they'd failed to catch him. I really have a hard time writing the response off as security theater when it seems like such a totally reasonable response for an efficiency perspective. And the odds of them planting future bombs was high to say the least, unlike some random stickup (which also happen not infrequently in Boston).

This was a very different situation than an armed robbery.