What does it hurt to have somebody knock on a door and ask, ‘Hey, is everything OK?’”
What could possibly go wrong. Hide your dog!!!!
Knock on door?
Yeah, a BIG one that knocks it down.
What we really need is a specialized police unit that apprehends criminals based on foreknowledge. If we had a “PreCrime” unit we could remove all guns and their’d be peace in the world.
Why hasn’t somebody done something like this, yet?
If somebody is ranting and raving about wanting to shoot somebody in the government for some alleged grievance, I don’t think “knocking on their door” is quite the safe way to go about it.
Or to paraquote a character from “Die Hard”, “You’re gonna need some more police types”.
Secondly, if the person involved is stupid or mentally ill enought to stand on a street corner and make those kinds of threats, they should be reported by any concerned citizen. This is not a Kitty Genovese situation any more.
However, this type of program can be so mismanaged that it would be like the “old settle some scores” programs in the past, in various countries, including the Soviet Union, Cuba, Red China, and East Germany.
Interestingly, the American Left criticized one of our more successful counter-intelligence programs in Vietnam known as “Operation Phoenix”, which was used to gathering information about the Viet Cong Infrastructure’s deep cover members so as to arrest them in order to get information from them, and even to turn them against their former comrades.
It worked very well despite the Left’s disinformation programs to portray them as just setting up “revenge” actions by pissed off neighbors.
However, in the US, esp. a leftist craphole like eastern Florida, esp. Palm Beach, Miami, Broward County, etc., it would be a “turn in a conservative” program par excellance. Just drop a “dime” on your Tea Party or GOP member and watch the cops pay them a visit.
And any guy named “Chad” would be jailed just because of his name.
There re good cops, bad cops and stupid cops. Looks like Florida has a winner on two of the three kinds.
Before anyone goes off in a tirade against what I’m saying, my son is a cop, and I’ve worked on an Organized Crime Task Force. We know the crazies and the crooks.
How to handle them is much more complicated than just making a phone call. You need good, reliable information or someone is going to get killed.
And as regards this type of program having stopped the killers at Newtown or Aurora, Colorado, doubtful. Lanza didn’t go out and proclaim his desire to kill anyone, nor did the Aurora shooter send out printed announcements. Neither did Starkweather in Texas, Ted Bundy, or Jeffery Dahmer.
You have to understand the criminal mind, esp. the mentally ill criminal, in order to try and protect against them. This is not being done enough and most small town police departments don’t have that type of specialist on their staffs. That is the weak link in serious crime prevent.