The guide specifically calls for police agencies to set up what NTAC calls behavioral threat assessment units that can assess potential dangers and then provide resources to make sure individuals get help before they resort to violence.
This is the part that everyone is intentionally missing.
Most people that commit the kinds of mass violence that make national news can be diverted without getting caught up in law enforcement. These aren’t people that are mentally ill in most cases, but they usually do need some kind of help. A heavy-handed approach that involves jailing them or taking their rights because they might be dangerous at some unspecified point in the future is not a great approach, since we don’t have a functioning Pre-Crime Bureau yet. Moreover, as the Secret Service pointed out in a prior report, people that commit mass violence have a wide number of warning signs, but no person in their study had all of the warning signs, a very few had no obvious warning signs, and most of the warning signs are common and could apply to potentially hundreds of thousands of people.
This is the part that everyone is intentionally missing.
Most people that commit the kinds of mass violence that make national news can be diverted without getting caught up in law enforcement. These aren’t people that are mentally ill in most cases, but they usually do need some kind of help. A heavy-handed approach that involves jailing them or taking their rights because they might be dangerous at some unspecified point in the future is not a great approach, since we don’t have a functioning Pre-Crime Bureau yet. Moreover, as the Secret Service pointed out in a prior report, people that commit mass violence have a wide number of warning signs, but no person in their study had all of the warning signs, a very few had no obvious warning signs, and most of the warning signs are common and could apply to potentially hundreds of thousands of people.