Today’s news tells us the Nashville bomber’s girlfriend warned police that he was making bombs.
This is a common story after a tragedy. “We should have known. There were warning signs! Why didn’t the police do something?”
These stories bother us because we think a tragedy could have been avoided if pro-active steps were taken to deal with some troubled soul. But we’re seeing things from a privileged position — after the fact. We know (now) this particular guy was going to be trouble. What we don’t know — or at least I don’t know — is how many times the police are warned about some potential threat that never materializes.
What are the numbers? How many people who are flagged / accused as potential threats never end up doing anything wrong? Shall we round them all up because one in a hundred (I’m making that up) will end up setting off a bomb?
What percentage would justify pre-emptive action? If, for every five people accused of being “a disaster about to happen,” one disaster actually happens, does that justify taking away some of the liberties of the five? What if it’s one in ten? One in a hundred? One in a thousand?
The police and the justice system have to deal with this sort of thing all the time.
“He comes home drunk every night. One of these days he’s going to kill somebody!”
“He keeps threatening to get his gun and go after those people down the street who won’t keep their dog chained up.”
And, of course, the threats get far more serious.
I suspect it’s very hard to parse through all these possible threats and figure out which ones deserve serious scrutiny.
This reminds me a little bit of a debunking of the “they knew about Pearl Harbor and let it happen because they wanted a causus belli” thing I once heard.
The accusation is based on the idea that years later, someone got access to the recordings of the Japanese communications traffic that was being monitored and figured out that it revealed a planned attack.
But what they had at the time, was countless hours of radio and telegraphic chatter (imagine many different channels, over a period of weeks or months), that had first to be decrypted, then translated (we certainly didn’t have the translation capabilities we have now, especially if the government is going to regard all native Japanese speakers as more or less suspect to begin with), and then sifted through. And in sifting through, you had the issue that such messages still tend to be given in lightly coded, vague terms that the parties involved will understand better than an outside observer.
So yeah, the data was there, but the data being there, and the expectation that anyone would actually find the right needles in the haystack to get the message in time, are two entirely different things. The cops hearing every report of a troubled person doing disturbing things or making worrying threats, but being able to judge how and when to intervene with whom, is similarly hard to sort through.
Personally I do think that when someone says someone close them is actually *making bombs* it should be followed up. Nobody *actually makes bombs* who has no real intent to ever harm anyone, unless they’re some kind of weirdo mad scientist. Even if your friend is “only” going to blow up an empty barn in the middle of nowhere for kicks, that should be prevented. But there are many situations that are less obvious than that, and yet people stand around saying, “Didn’t anybody notice something was up?” Probably yes, they noticed. But that doesn’t mean that it’s clear what should have been done in response.
The analogy to Pearl Harbor is a good one.
There certainly are classes of threats that need to be followed up. Making bombs is probably one of them, although when I was a kid, we used to make cannons out of bamboo and match heads. Some nosy neighbor might have reported us as making bombs.
Yes, I was definitely not talking about Polish cannons (a string of beer/soda cans taped together and lit with lighter fluid to make a bang) or potato guns, or someone who says, “the neighbor kids keep shooting off things that go boom, maybe they’re making bombs”. I meant a situation where someone literally says, “I know someone who is making bombs.”