Police Chief on the grill

An excerpt from an interview of the Texas police chief by Chris Hayes re the kid and the digital clock bomb: 

“Once it’s determined that this is just a clock or just a piece of electronics, why then the arrest and all of that?” he asked Boyd. “That’s very hard for folks to understand.”

“I get that. I understand the concern,” the chief responded. “The officers pretty quickly determined that they weren’t investigating an explosive device. What their investigation centered around is the law violation of bringing a device into a facility like that that is intended to create a level of alarm. In other words, a hoax bomb — something that is not really a bomb, but is designed and presented in a way that it creates people to be afraid.”

“Right, but he never called it a bomb, right?” Hayes countered. “He just kept calling it a clock. I mean, it never came out of his lips, he never did something or started showing it around saying, ‘Look at this bomb I have.’ He said, ‘Look at my clock.'” 

“There definitely was some confusion and some level of information that didn’t come out immediately,” Boyd said, adding that in many cases, someone who would make a “hoax bomb” would not be likely to admit to doing so to police.

How different would the interrogations of the kid been if he were not Muslim?