It’s horrible to call anything about a terrorist attack “funny”, but it’s definitely something that the ringleader of last week’s terrorist attack in London was featured in a documentary about jihadists living in Britain. Kind of makes it harder to pull the “nobody could have predicted this” card.
But I sympathize with the British police in this one. Every so often some mentally ill person commits a violent crime, and the news focuses on how their psychiatrist had written in their notes that they were potentially violent, likely to commit crimes, et cetera. And people ask “everyone knew this could happen; why didn’t anybody do anything?”
And the answer is: being the sort of person who seems likely to commit a crime isn’t illegal.
I assume that if someone reports a potential terrorist to the British police, they tap their phones and keep a watch on them and so on. But (especially if the potential terrorist is a citizen) I’m not sure what else they can do without sacrificing the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”. Freedom of speech isn’t just about being able to say politically incorrect things at colleges, it also means you can’t lock up a Muslim for saying “Those ISIS people seem to have some bright ideas” on national TV.
I wonder if someone in intelligence services has put together a list of people they would like to be able to lock up forever if we ever became a police state. And I wonder if anyone has ever looked back on the list a couple years later to see how many of those people actually ever caused any problems. My guess is that even a really good intelligence officer would have a lot of trouble coming up with a list like that where fewer than 99% of the entries were false positives. And that means that even knowing that some recent suspect was on a list like that doesn’t mean anything necessarily went wrong.
I mean, involuntary commitment is a thing. There does reach a point of “this person is dangerous to their self or others, we have to lock them up.” I think that if anything involuntary commitment is over used, but in the US at least it is absolutely possible to imprison someone because they are sufficiently likely to commit a crime.
With very rare exceptions, involuntary commitment lasts a few days to a few weeks.
This is exactly the problem, in fact. Potentially-violent people tend to get involuntarily committed and put on some medication that would probably help them if they took it. Then after a few weeks they get discharged, stop taking the medication (often hard to blame them, sometimes they can’t afford it, other times too many side effects, other times they slip up once and then become too confused to get back on it), and relapse. Lots of these people have been in and out of psych hospitals a bunch of times before they finally snap and hurt someone. Then the psychiatrist who treated them the last time gets sued under a Tarasoff expansion case, even though there was nothing they could have done differently.
The solution here a lot of people are settling on is “outpatient commitment orders”, where a judge orders you to take your medication and orders other people to check up on you. It sort of works, sometimes (although not everyone is treatable with medication, and sometimes even when the medication works it’s just sedating people so strongly that they don’t want to do anything, including commit crimes). I’m not sure what the terrorism-related equivalent would be.
One terrorism-related equivalent was attempted in the UK between 2005 and 2011. The Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 provided for “control orders”; orders made by the state to deprive a person of their liverty for the purpose of “protecting members of the public from a risk of terrorism”.
(This whole thing actually began back in (wait for it) 2001.)
Orders made under the 2005 Act were almost univserally panned by Judges on the basis that they broke human rights laws.
One example of such panning is the case of SSHD v JJ & Ors [2006] EWCA Civ 1141, wherein all of the detainees were required to remain with their residence at all times, apart from a period of 6 hours between 10am and 4pm. (Hyper-curfew?) All of them were effectively confined to their one-bedroomed, stae provided apartments. All visitors had to be authorised by the state, and the apartments were subject tospot checks by the police.
Even when they were allowed out, they were confined to a restricted urban area. The largest was 72 square km. They couldn’t meet up with anyone who had not been pre-authorised.
It was found that these amounted to a “deprivation of liberty”, and as such engaged the Convention on Human Rights. (It was found that the DOLs were a breach of Article 5 of the Convention).
This whole thing was binned in 2011, when the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act 2011 replaced control orders with “notices”, which are less restrictive.