Threat Assessment and Refugee Psychosis Concerns

I. Threat Assessment to Reduce Mass Shootings
Due to mass shootings -- defined as four or persons killed or injured -- averaging more than one a day by early December 2015, security efforts at public venues are turning more and more to threat assessment teams. Threat assessment is essentially a three-part process: identifying, evaluating and then intervening. When the author of an article in Mother Jones magazine. asked threat assessment experts what might explain the recent rise in gun rampages, he heard the "same two words over and over: social media." [1]

The biggest drawback to threat assessment is that, except for a copycat pattern in the Columbine, Colorado high school shooting -- there is no discernible pattern or connection in mass shootings. One of the biggest challenges to threat assessment work is that the quieter, less outwardly threatening subjects can prove to be the most dangerous.

To turn to the Columbine High School shootings and use of explosives, in a number of cases, persons contemplating or actively carrying out mass shootings, made references to the two Columbine students as the inspiration for their planned action. A few even visited Columbine, which they saw as the shrine for their destructive planning.

II. Refugee Psychosis and Retention Concerns
An analysis of more than four million records reported in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that immigrants from East Africa and Southeast Asia were nearly twice as likely to develop psychosis as the general public was. It is not clear what the reason for this is, except that Africa has many child soldiers mixed into the database.

Immigrant detention is a real problem, as the immigration court system has a backlog of half a million deportation cases, even though hearings tend to be brisk -- at the expense of having sufficient information to make an informed decision. The Department of Homeland Security is unique in the sense that it is the only law enforcement agency that is required by law to detain a certain number of people. [2]

ADDENDUMS:
*When Chief Justice John G. Roberts was a young special assistant to the U.S. attorney general, he led a crusade to gut the Voter Rights Act by eliminating the preclearance requirements and demanding explicit evidence of racist intentions, not simply an evaluation of the effects of voting restrictions, to invalidate voting laws. We seem to be in the midst of a Second Revolution on the right to vote but instead of expanding voting rights, we seem to be in a devious competition to see who can disenfranchise the most people. Chief Justice Roberts, of course, has been a major force in facilitating the enactment of restrictive voting laws.

*Donald Trump has claimed that African-Americans kill eighty-one percent of  white murder victims. The FBI says that white victims are murdered by other whites eighty-two percent of the time. Although  black-on-black murders are emphasized among commentators in the media -- it is about ninety percent -- the eighty-two percent of white-on-white murders is not that much different.

Footnotes
[1] Mark Fallmer, "Trigger Warnings," Mother Jones, November/December  2015.

[2] Rachel Aviv, "The Refugee Dilemma,": The New Yorker, December 7, 2015.