Another problem is that once a policy is made to say "Take ALL of them
seriously, always", it further encourages trolls to disrupt schools by
making threats resulting in cancellations, delays, lockdowns, weapons checks
and general panic.
Delirium wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
1. Most people aren't nearly as good at
detecting credible threats as
they (or you) think. Police and other authorities are - there are
specific training and analysis methods involved, including psych
consults if there are certain warning flags, etc. Ask any
crisis-trained psychiatrist, law enforcement officer who investigates
these, etc.
Police and other authorities are actually quite poor at it as well.
The
fundamental problem is that there are not credible "warning signs" that
don't have extremely high rates of false positives, to the point where
around 100% of individuals distinguished by the criteria are false
positives. That's to be expected, of course, since school shootings are
extremely rare, so in statistical terms, the number of future school
shooters in any population you care to distinguish is effectively
0---you'd have to track down not 100 false positives, but hundreds of
thousands, and still might not find any legitimate positives (the number
of actual school shooters in the history of schooling is below 200). In
fact there is not a single documented case in which a report from the
public averted a school shooting. I could think of some cases where it
might at least have a nonzero chance, such as gun-shop owners reporting
suspicious attempts to purchase weapons, but Wikipedia posts aren't
among them.
-Mark, who probably fulfills a bunch of the "warning signs" himself but
discourages harrassment-via-cop, please
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