[Foundation-l] School shooting threats

[George Herbert]

On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 2:21 AM, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> 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

When I was in high school, I certainly displayed a bunch of what are
commonly interpreted as warning signs now... I had access to and
experience with firearms (target shooting with parents in the country,
and after age 16 by myself at ranges around our house), explosives and
pyrotechnics (only used for fun kabooms at beach parties), hung out
with a small social group who were in many ways misfits in the larger
school social circles, etc.

A close friend of mine was, in fact, investigated by the police and
school administration over a joke which was made (by others) while he
was on Homecoming Court our senior year.  It was stunningly evident to
everyone that there had been no "threat" per se, or any capability or
intent to carry anything out, and no harm was done.  Nobody got
arrested.  The police and school called my friend's father, and later
met with him and his father in person at school, and it was all
friendly and professional.

The idea that we're ruining people's lives by reporting things is
balderdash.  Police do not use SWAT teams to arrest kids on first
indication that there may have been a threat.  We are not contributing
to societal abuse of kids who are merely different.



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