{"id":906,"date":"2020-12-31T00:46:05","date_gmt":"2020-12-31T00:46:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/?p=906"},"modified":"2020-12-31T00:46:05","modified_gmt":"2020-12-31T00:46:05","slug":"people-who-threaten-mayhem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/2020\/12\/31\/people-who-threaten-mayhem\/","title":{"rendered":"How do we deal with people who threaten mayhem?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s news<\/a> tells us the Nashville bomber’s girlfriend warned police that he was making bombs. <\/p>\n

This is a common story after a tragedy. “We should have known. There were warning signs! Why didn’t the police do something?” <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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? <\/p>\n

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? <\/p>\n

The police and the justice system have to deal with this sort of thing all the time. <\/p>\n

“He comes home drunk every night. One of these days he’s going to kill somebody!” <\/p>\n

“He keeps threatening to get his gun and go after those people down the street who won’t keep their dog chained up.” <\/p>\n

And, of course, the threats get far more serious<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I suspect it’s very hard to parse through all these possible threats and figure out which ones deserve serious scrutiny. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “How do we deal with people who threaten mayhem?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=906"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":907,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906\/revisions\/907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}