How do you tell a suicide bomber?
Explaining the difficult job the police have to do, Commissioner Ian Blair notes, "I know there have been 250 incidents since the July 7 where we have considered whether we are seeing a suicide bomber. And I know that when I last saw it that there have been seven times when we have got as close to calling it as that and we haven't".What he actually means by this is not clear, but if he means it in the sense of how they tried to identify Friday's victim, I'm not sure if this is reassuring or not. On the one hand it shows the Police are more discriminate with their firing than we feared. 250 times they had a suspect, and only once did they fire. On the other hand it suggests that their procedures for identifying suicide bombers have flashed up 250 potential ones, in which 7 times it almost got to the point of saying they were, and 1 time it said the person was. Yet none of these times was the person a suicide bomber. On the other hand 0 times out of 4 did they spot the actual ones*.
This is not to criticise the Police, as almost everyone believes safety-first is the best policy, but to suggest that the policy of trying to spot potential suicide bombers from their actions, rather than having identified them as such through intelligence, turns up a lot of negatives, particularly when the proportion of people who are suicide bombers is something like 1-1 million.
* This is assuming that they didn't, but it doesn't look like it.
posted by Matthew @ 7/27/2005 03:41:00 PM
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