You always hear after atrocities people discussing ‘how could this have been stopped/prevented?’ It usually warning signs. For terrorist attacks, its warnings from other governments of communication between groups and for mass murderers its usually warnings from authority figures of the mass shooter.
But let’s focus on you, the average person. Whether you’re American, English, Irish, French etc…you are likely to encounter in your lifetime a coworker, acquaintance, friend or even your own family members who express some ‘extreme beliefs’. They can be polite, functional in society but have a deep desire to commit mass murder on a grand scale without any concern for the lives of others. And terrorists don’t have to do it in the name of Islam or any religious group. They can be for gender rights, environmental rights etc.
My question is, would you report this person? Even if they never threatened you personally or anyone else. Just uttering homicidal ideations towards a certain group or saying ‘When I finish college, I will just end (insert group) lives’.
Some won’t because their are plenty of ‘whackos’ whose hands will never be cuffed or will never even see the face of police officers at their doorstep. In other words, there are too many false alarms to know which one’s are genuine or just ranting.
But then again, that’s what those around the Connecticut, Virginia Tech, or Columbine shooters probably thought. ‘This guy is just weird. Nothing more’. Didn’t turn out to well.
I have. A mutual friend let me know of some threatening Facebook posts that an acquaintance was posting. He was suggesting blowing up the plant he worked in since he couldn’t blow up Obama and Washington. I immediately called the supervisor working at the PD and he wound up spending some time in a hospital under observation.
I’m not reporting anyone for expressing general statements. Repeated expression of I hate XXXXXXX will be enough to make me find reasons not to associate, but isn’t criminal.
Vague statements of revenge, again probably not.
But statements or evidence of planning specific actions, yes.
Ditto. Random statements wouldn’t concern me. Everyone has moments when they fantasize about grotesque acts of retribution, but usually it’s only a fantasy. But I would ask them questions and if someone started telling detailed (and feasible) plans for how they were going to accomplish some horrible act or worse asked for help (like a straw purchase of a weapon), I would be calling my favorite detective ASAP.
I’m with the others here: it’s a matter of specificity. People who hate other groups or make vague threats are people I won’t associate with for very long, but that’s not enough to make me think they’re a likely threat. Saying “someone should kill them” is very different in my mind from saying “I should kill them.”
It might also depend on my overall take on someone’s mental health. One of my college roommates actually put a pipe bomb under a police car in his high school days. Another guy I knew was just very strange in many ways, including a fixation with guns, confusion over his sexuality and a desire to be a panther. (Yes, you read that last one right.) If either of those guys had even hinted at something violent, I would have been concerned.
I’m with Loach. I would report. I have reported on multiple occasions and more than one person ended up on involuntary hold due to my reports. (Yes, my past occupation played a part in some of these reports.)
Yes, you have to use your judgement, but if those hairs on the back of your neck are creeping, don’t worry about making the wrong call. That’s someone else’s problem, not yours. You make the call, and people who are trained take it from there. I’m not saying you should run around crying wolf at the least little thing, but if it seems wrong, make the call.
If they expressed extreme beliefs out loud, sure I might report them. But society runs into the danger of incidents like the woman who reported an airline passenger to security because she found the math equations that he had written, scary.
Over 25 years ago in the build-up to the first Gulf war I was doing a business studies course in the North East of England. I was temporarily out of work and this was a government scheme in order to get people back into jobs but it was open to other students as well.
One of the chaps on my course was an Iraqi and this was unusual enough to warrant conversation but he kept himself to himself and was quiet and polite yet a couple of things were curious.
He’d miss a week or two and on return he’d tell us that his rich uncle in Egypt needed him to run unspecified errands outside the country. He also drove a spanking new Audi 80 quattro.
Strange. Well the tensions increased and at the point thatFarzad Bazoft was arrested and executed this Iraqi chap was being increasingly evasive and erratic.
Anyhoo, my friend’s dad was in the CID (police criminal investigations department) and so I told him all about it.
The next week this chap disappeared never to return and the week after that the Iraqi supergun parts were stopped from leaving the country at Teesport, only a couple of miles from where the course was held.
Now, I never followed up with the CID as to whether my info had led anywhere, he wouldn’t have told me anyway and I was never officially questioned so I suspect nothing was done. I do still wonder whether it was all coincidence or not. After all, if he was a genuine student being bankrolled by a rich uncle then I can easily imagine him doing a runner when the international situation started to deteriorate but still…who knows?
Twice in my life, I’ve had people hiding in my house. Once in New Orleans during Garrison’s JFK assassination witchhunt, and once when Trudeau invoked the war measures act in Canada. Was I to turn these people in, who just thought it prudent to keep their heads down because of prior activity that a person with a strong imagination could associate with terrorist associations?
"Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That . . . in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear! "
–Midsummer Night’s Dream
Speaking of weapons of math equations, a couple of people I know were questioned by security (this was well before 2001, so they were not detained) because someone heard them talking about a perfectly innocent thing called an annihilator. (The annihilator of an element is the set of all elements that multiply it out to get 0. Think of matrices for an example.) Another thing I would avoid talking about in an airport something called “The Killing form”, named after a perfectly peaceable German mathematician named Wilhelm Killing. You can google it.
Random statements wouldn’t disturb me too much. (Heck, 've heard people express a sincere hope for divine intervention/spontaneous manifestation of a brick a few feet above Trump’s head, after the election.) If it’s a pattern/starting to scare people around them, then yes.
I would rather make a report and have it turn out to be nothing, than not make a report and realize afterwards that I might have helped stop something terrible from happening. That said, you have to use reasonable judgment. Someone blowing off steam, without more, would not lead me to call 911.