[Foundation-l] School shooting threats

[Voice of All]

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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