BOMB Threat

[Phil]

Frankly I'd check a bag left on the street. I mean, I walk around Chicago and I will see numerous people trying to negotiate several bags, or maybe it bounced off of the bed of a pickup truck. Not every package is going to kill me, and if it does, well, then I'll at least have in interesting obituary. I mean, come on, even the people who play Counter Strike know to hide the bomb. The anthrax threat I could understand though, you never can be too careful with powders and bio-weapons.

 

[Nashoba]

When we were still in California, I was a dispatcher for a small police department just south of San Jose. Right after 9/11 we saw a huge increase in calls related to various "threats" none of which were credible. Please bear in mind we were a department of 30 sworn in a town of maybe 30,000 people. We had one citizen walk into our lobby toting an envelope saying that they had received it in the mail and it had a suspicious white powder on it and proceeded to wave the envelope around hysterically distributing the powder into the air. We had to quarantine our lobby and the front part of our records department, call in hazmat, and call in the state and federal authorities. The culprit? Baby Powder. The whole deal cost the city about $15,000.
We had the hardest time convincing our citizens that our city was by no means anything close to a terrorist target.

 

[Etienne]

This is what gets me.

Assuming there aren't stray wires, chemical stains or smells or something protruding that don't show in the picture, that isn't a "suspicious package", it is a "lost bag". You'll never hear the person who reported it or the police who responded explicate whether it truly fit any of the known IED criteria. It was simply a bag lying on the ground and some ninny freaked out and called the cops.

Prior to 9/11 it would have been picked up by a passerby and turned in to building security who would have opened it to see if they could find ID. And, just like this one and statistically every other lost bag in the country, it would be found to not be a bomb.

This unnecessary knee-jerk panic we go through now that totally ignores reason and perspective is annoying.

This sort of thing isn't a triumph of Homeland Security or Public Safety, it's a waste of time and resources. Who needs to go to terrorist bomb school, just stuff bulky objects (books say) into fanny packs and drop them in public. No crime is committed (except maybe littering) yet you can shut down businesses for hours and totally disrupt people's lives.

The general public in this country needs to be better educated on this stuff, we are being ill-served by the authorities and media. 0-percent risk is not an achievable or desireable goal for life.

The sad reality, Carebear, is that every one of those supposed "threats" has to be taken seriously because of the number of nut cases out there. The first time the police (or others in authority) second guess the situation and gets it wrong, there will be hell to pay. No matter what the police do, people complain; if they respond to the threat (as they are required to do) they are criticized for it. If they fail to respond, and something should happen, they are criticized for not taking threats seriously. These are not shoes most people choose to walk in every day, but those who DO deserve our respect, not our armchair critiques. As for "the general public of this country being better educated on this stuff"--the general public barely speaks English any longer and "educating" them about the veracity of potential bomb scares is not something they can be counted upon to master. And who exactly would "educate" them? Wouldn't it be the police? And wouldn't they be told that it's THEIR job to figure out if something is a danger to society or not? I have known two bomb squad leaders who were blown to pieces by an innocent looking bomb package and they knew what they were dealing with.

 

[carebear]

The sad reality, Carebear, is that every one of those supposed "threats" has to be taken seriously because of the number of nut cases out there. The first time the police (or others in authority) second guess the situation and gets it wrong, there will be hell to pay. No matter what the police do, people complain; if they respond to the threat (as they are required to do) they are criticized for it. If they fail to respond, and something should happen, they are criticized for not taking threats seriously. These are not shoes most people choose to walk in every day, but those who DO deserve our respect, not our armchair critiques. As for "the general public of this country being better educated on this stuff"--the general public barely speaks English any longer and "educating" them about the veracity of potential bomb scares is not something they can be counted upon to master. And who exactly would "educate" them? Wouldn't it be the police? And wouldn't they be told that it's THEIR job to figure out if something is a danger to society or not? I have known two bomb squad leaders who were blown to pieces by an innocent looking bomb package and they knew what they were dealing with.

Threats should be taken seriously but also rated based on likelyhood. An anonymous bomb threat phoned into a local high school during final's week? The actual number of such threats nationwide that have turned out to be true? Zero.

Backtrack the call and search the school discretely but don't evacuate the dang thing for a whole day. Heck, as a slightly intelligent true bomber you can get a higher casualty count by phoning in a threat, watching the drill and then a month later planting the actual device at the densest chokepoint on a command detonator and calling in another threat. Voila, your targets delivered to you on a silver platter.

The threats we really need to worry about we aren't actually going to be able to stop, just respond to. The fact our society is too litigious and willing to blame the good guys for the realistically unpreventable actions of madmen and evil folks I don't know how to solve.

But creating a situation where you can stop the world for a day with a telephone call and no actual effort is too far in the direction of seeking a completely unattainable level of safety. Officialdom should start laying out the facts of life and getting people used to the idea that safety is an illusion and sometimes bad things happen with only the perpetrator to blame.