It’s horrible to call anything about a terrorist attack “funny”, but it’s definitely something that the ringleader of last week’s terrorist attack in London was featured in a documentary about jihadists living in Britain. Kind of makes it harder to pull the “nobody could have predicted this” card.
But I sympathize with the British police in this one. Every so often some mentally ill person commits a violent crime, and the news focuses on how their psychiatrist had written in their notes that they were potentially violent, likely to commit crimes, et cetera. And people ask “everyone knew this could happen; why didn’t anybody do anything?”
And the answer is: being the sort of person who seems likely to commit a crime isn’t illegal.
I assume that if someone reports a potential terrorist to the British police, they tap their phones and keep a watch on them and so on. But (especially if the potential terrorist is a citizen) I’m not sure what else they can do without sacrificing the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”. Freedom of speech isn’t just about being able to say politically incorrect things at colleges, it also means you can’t lock up a Muslim for saying “Those ISIS people seem to have some bright ideas” on national TV.
I wonder if someone in intelligence services has put together a list of people they would like to be able to lock up forever if we ever became a police state. And I wonder if anyone has ever looked back on the list a couple years later to see how many of those people actually ever caused any problems. My guess is that even a really good intelligence officer would have a lot of trouble coming up with a list like that where fewer than 99% of the entries were false positives. And that means that even knowing that some recent suspect was on a list like that doesn’t mean anything necessarily went wrong.
I mean, involuntary commitment is a thing. There does reach a point of “this person is dangerous to their self or others, we have to lock them up.” I think that if anything involuntary commitment is over used, but in the US at least it is absolutely possible to imprison someone because they are sufficiently likely to commit a crime.
With very rare exceptions, involuntary commitment lasts a few days to a few weeks.
This is exactly the problem, in fact. Potentially-violent people tend to get involuntarily committed and put on some medication that would probably help them if they took it. Then after a few weeks they get discharged, stop taking the medication (often hard to blame them, sometimes they can’t afford it, other times too many side effects, other times they slip up once and then become too confused to get back on it), and relapse. Lots of these people have been in and out of psych hospitals a bunch of times before they finally snap and hurt someone. Then the psychiatrist who treated them the last time gets sued under a Tarasoff expansion case, even though there was nothing they could have done differently.
The solution here a lot of people are settling on is “outpatient commitment orders”, where a judge orders you to take your medication and orders other people to check up on you. It sort of works, sometimes (although not everyone is treatable with medication, and sometimes even when the medication works it’s just sedating people so strongly that they don’t want to do anything, including commit crimes). I’m not sure what the terrorism-related equivalent would be.
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