Quote: Cronus "If some idiot rings 999 and says "a bloke on our bus is preparing a bomb", what the feck do you expect them to do?
Not sure you can blame the authorities for this one. If they'd not bothered and the bus had exploded they'd be universally panned, investigated, heads would roll, etc.'"
I expect them to use their well trained and well paid brains!
Well, I would ask them what they knew about feckin bombs to convince me that's what he was doing. Mostly, if I could, I'd do something that did not involve (as it here did) giving the putative bomber 2 hours to explode his putative device before anyone did anything.
Then, if I felt the moron was giving me at least enough suspicions that it might genuinely be something serious, I wouldn't instruct them to park up and make sure all passengers stayed on the bus until platoons of troops and police arrived, since the longer they stayed on the bus, the longer they stood a great chance of being blown to smithereens, gassed or whatever I suspected.
Mostly, I'd assume that if by pouring some liquid into some bag and producing smoke, nothing had either blown up, or gassed anybody at that stage, then it was almost certainly bollox, and not at all justifying such an outrageous response.
Under your expectation, (which is that on getting such a call, that is what they MUST do) the terrorists could bankrupt a country in a week, they just place 50 of those calls a day and soon the entire economy is fooked and the country is paralysed.