Threat Assessment is Communism

CNN published an article on “threat assessment” and how mass shootings are caused by grievance rather than mental illness. The article is both brilliant and idiotic. The central thesis has two elements, the second element being invisible to its author. I compare this to communism, because like communism it clearly states the scientific problem that people wish to solve. But it then misses the realities of the human condition that make government solutions a mirage.

The first element of the article is that, according to college professor Reid Meloy, both mass shooters and terrorists follow a pattern. “There is first the loss, and then there’s humiliation, anger and blame, and then what follows is the person deciding that there is only one solution to this grievance, and that is to carry out a violent act.” The second element, is that the stages which mass shooters progress through – grievance, ideation, research, planning, security breach – are visible to third parties who can intervene.

This is similar to how economists such as Karl Marx understood that providing human need involved multiple stages of farming and mining, transporting inputs to factories, transforming them into products, and distributing those products to consumers. Communist economists then made the leap that all the government needs to do is monitor and supervise each step, and it can manage the process, and satisfy human needs in the optimal way. After this point, “threat assessment” is not that much different from economic need assessment and central planning.

It is natural for all scientists whether Marx or Meloy, to begin analysis of the problem by imagining a laboratory setting with both perfect knowledge and control. Friedrich Hayek realized the true problem is not what we could do if we had perfect knowledge and understood the production process. That would be easy. The real problem is that we not only do not have perfect knowledge, but the incentives facing those who do have the local bits of knowledge, or have the power to make decisions, hardly line up with the imagined goal. There is no “we”.

Thomas Sowell recognized all institutions will be forced by natural selection to act in the interest of their own survival. Governments endowed with the power to monitor and coerce economic actors, always end up manufacturing votes and tanks, rather than milk and medicine. So let’s imagine two hypothetical governments endowed with the power to observe individuals, and intervene on their paths to becoming mass shooters.

Government One spends a lot of money, violates a lot of privacy, and harasses a lot of people in a nerdy effort to achieve “threat assessment”. The mass shooters themselves know what is going on, and become more secretive. At the end, Government One manages to intercept one in five mass shooters, and reduce mass shootings by 20%. There are still a lot of mass shootings. In fact, the government has created more aggrieved people, and it may be 20% of a larger number. Government One is considered ineffective based on the true numbers reported, and voted out of office.

Government Two has the same power. But instead of looking for mass shooters, it uses “threat assessment” to look for political opponents. It uses its power to harass people who speak against its regime, or point out the true numbers that their “threat assessment” is ineffective. It says “These people speaking against our regime are aggrieved. Their goal is to subvert and damage our community and put our children at risk, by enabling the criminals. Their protests are a step along the pathway to violence. They need to be institutionalized.”

Government Two does not stop any mass shooters. In fact, it needs and uses more mass shooters, as justification for more and broader surveillance and intervention powers. Government Two controls the narrative by using its “threat assessment” powers to incarcerate anyone who points out what is going on. Government Two preserves and increases its power by using its power to increase mass shootings, and control political speech. Government two creates a happy story of progress that hides the brutal reality, and stays in office.

But it gets worse. The people who are supposed to do the threat assessment – local police – are actually the aggrieved ones looking for revenge. The first stage is the loss: A cop gets shot, a jury sets OJ free, a cop is falsely accused like Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. The second stage is humiliation, anger and blame: Millionaire sports stars go around wearing “hands up don’t shoot” tshirts and accusing cops of shooting an innocent man Big Mike Brown. Imperfections in the world are blamed on bad people, Democrats, blacks, and marxists.

The third stage is ideation: Academic polemicist Heather McDonald writes “The War on Cops” in which she characterizes the situation as a war, with police as heroes, and common citizens as a threat to western civilization. The fourth stage is the solution: Police chiefs, mayors, sheriffs, and prosecutors start looking the other way on accusations of police misconduct, with the vain imagined moral mission “to save lives”.

The fifth stage is violence: Members of the political opposition faction are seen as enemy combatants, a threat to the tribe. It is a quiet necessity to ignore their rights and the law, to conserve our way of life. Courts are subverted with perjury arranged by government officials. Fake crimes are invented and incompetents are condemned in show trials. So-called journalists are granted special “privileges” to broadcast any lie the government tells as the truth (and sell a lot of papers) with immunity from any repercussions from the targets of government aggression.

“Threat assessment” will ultimately be used toward totalitarian ends. And the geeky scientists who dreamed of seeing their designs put into practice, will either conform and speak positively of how it is progressing – and will receive handsome funding – or will end up on the guillotine, plata o plomo.