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Hysteria: How to dismantle an imaginary bomb

Decaf lattes should be mandatory for SF police

How in the world do you get from this…

A 44-year-old man was arrested Tuesday night on suspicion of planting a bomb in the bathroom of a Starbucks coffee shop, police said….

Police said the bomb was powerful enough to seriously injure or kill someone if it had exploded.

…to this?

What authorities thought was a bomb in a Starbucks coffee shop turned out to be a flashlight casing, police said Thursday.

A forensic analysis “revealed the absence of any explosive material,” a police statement said.

The San Francisco police have some ’splainin’ to do.

San Francisco authorities struggled to explain Thursday how they concluded that an object left in a Starbucks bathroom was a bomb, when tests revealed it was nothing more than a flashlight with corroded batteries.

“This appeared, by itself, to be a bomb,” said police spokesman Sgt. Neville Gittens, who was the first to relay word from bomb squad investigators Monday afternoon that the object was an “improvised explosive device.” The news quickly went national, and at one point CNN was broadcasting developments.

Gittens would not specify what about the device was so convincing, other than to say that all the people who saw it described it as a “tube-shaped cylinder with a fuse.”

Yes, panicky people “see” a lot of things. That’s why eyewitness testimony is so highly regarded. Is Gittens including highly-trained law enforcement personnel among those who saw this “fuse”?

In the meantime, the homeless schmo who inadvertently left the flashlight in the Starbucks’ restroom in the first place and had been arrested on suspicicion of “planting a bomb” is still in legal trouble. Ronald Schouten is alleged to have left the Starbucks for a Circuit City where he supposedly “used the bag the coffeehouse gave him for the coffee grounds to shoplift a camera.”

Even if SF’s finest have to suffer self-inflicted national embarrassment, they’re gonna get their pound of flesh and arrest somebody for something.

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