[Foundation-l] School shooting threats

[George Herbert]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 10:43 AM, Voice of All <jschulz_4587 at msn.com> wrote:
> Close to my sentiments on this.
>
> Delirium wrote:
>> Nathan wrote:
>>> While vague threats to celebrities and "I'ma kill
>>> Joe, he's a dickwad" are often reverted and ignored as simple and
>>> unserious
>>> vandalism, school threats have a unique nature in public sentiment and
>>> require a unique position in policy.
>> I don't agree with this leap of logic. They only "require" a unique
>> position in policy if your only consideration is public relations. If
>> your consideration also includes morality, then they require quite the
>> opposite---carefully considering the situation and making an informed
>> judgment as to the pros and cons of various courses of action. A policy
>> that requires all school threats to be reported would probably be the
>> best policy for cover-your-ass PR in hindsight if anything happened, but
>> it would certainly not be ethical to ruin children's lives over
>> obviously not-credible threats.

However...

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.  It's a complex problem.  They much much prefer that you
hand it to them to figure it out.

And...

2. The actual degree of "ruin children's lives" that happens after a
false report, absent other indicators of impending violence, is
relatively small.  In most cases there are no criminal charges, only a
warning and report made.

Law enforcement emphatically encourage reporting, they would rather
chase down leads on 100 false alarms than not get the call on the one
kid who is about to go to school and try to kill someone (or
themselves, or whatever).

I have not reported every single threatening thing posted by a school
age user on Wikipedia.  But I have reported a bunch or helped with
reports on them, and will continue to do so.  If it's credible enough
that any administrator or other user is worried about it and reports
it somewhere, they and others should hand it to trained authorities
and let them figure it out from there.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com