Comments on: Are Police the Best Response?

By: John Kelsey

John Kelsey — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 11:46:41 +0000

I think helping people work out how to minimize the damage done by an attack, route around it, survive it, and help the survivors is all obviously useful. Helping people identify bombers seems awfully hard, both because of the false positive rate and because bombers can adapt to the description to avoid detection. This is like a human-mediated biometric for group membership, and it seems hard to get right. Maybe this is easier in Israel, I don’t know.
–John

By: Adam

Adam — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 16:22:39 +0000

“Let Niskanen stick that in his pipe and smoke it.”
1) Who?
2) This is a non-smoking blog, he’ll have to go outside.

By: allan friedman

allan friedman — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 14:40:19 +0000

I think Beri has a good point: even if trying to teaching 6 million people how to spot a bomber doesn’t increase vigilantism, it will almost certainly increase false positives to a dramatic–possibly crippling–degree. I think training for basic emergency care is a great idea. But you have to admire administrators who would rather not spend money than spend it poorly. Let Niskanen stick that in his pipe and smoke it.

By: izar

izar — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 14:30:01 +0000

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/be_prepared.htm
Now, to each their own conclusions if this is good or bad education. But, it seems to be a sincere effort, IMHO.
There should be more signs that someone is about to go kaboom than the color of their skin. Thru education we can make those known – and reduce the risk of racial profiling ?

By: beri

beri — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 13:18:20 +0000

Since the supposedly well trained British police cannot distinguish between a fare beater and a terrorist, why would you want the people of New York to be spotting terrorists? Vigilantes are usually a bad idea, especially since it would certainly result in the kind of racial profiling that we want to avoid.