piece and you started to talk about threat assessment i sort of immediately had this kind of minority report kind of feeling, like are we going to get into the world of precrime. even when we throw around the term of mental illness in the wake of this, there s literally tens of millions of people who, quote, have mental illness. look at all the people on ssris. right? so that category just seems like almost a useless one in its largest way. this is something much, much more sort of focused and rigorous. right. and that is a really key point, chris, that not only is the mental health profile far too broad to be meaningful for trying to stop these types of crimes, it s one of many, many factors that they look at and it takes into account itself the context of every single case, the current circumstances of the person of concern. that has a lot to do with the level of concern with threat assessment teams and how they go about trying to intervene. and that is a key distinction. it s no
piece and you started to talk about threat assessment i sort of immediately had this kind of minority report kind of feeling, like are we going to get into the world of precrime. even when we throw around the term of mental illness in the wake of this, there s literally tens of millions of people who, quote, have mental illness. look at all the people on ssris. right? so that category just seems like almost a useless one in its largest way. this is something much, much more sort of focused and rigorous. right. and that is a really key point, chris, that not only is the mental health profile far too broad to be meaningful for trying to stop these types of crimes, it s one of many, many factors that they look at and it takes into account itself the context of every single case, the current circumstances of the person of concern. that has a lot to do with the level of concern with threat assessment teams and how they go about trying to intervene. and that is a key distinction. it s no
happening. the way they do this is it essentially starts with a tip about someone who s creating anxiety or fear at the local level and if it gets to what s called a threat assessment team, this group of law enforcement and mental health professionals get together and quickly try to analyze the situation to gather as much information as possible, as they can about the individual, and then they try to intervene in the most constructive way possible. and one of the most fascinating aspects of it is this is by and large social and mental health interventions. it rarely involves arrest and prosecution. and even when there are national law enforcement agencies involved there s a whole unit of the fbi that s been doing this increasingly for the last few years, and as the head of that unit told me for this story, their goal is prevention, not prosecution. in the vast majority of cases that s what they try to do. when i first started the piece and you started to talk about threat assessment
even when we throw around the term of mental illness in the wake of this, there s literally tens of millions of people who, quote, have mental illness. look at all the people on ssris. right? so that category just seems like almost a useless one in its largest way. this is something much, much more sort of focused and rigorous. right. and that is a really key point, chris, that not only is the mental health profile far too broad to be meaningful for trying to stop these types of crimes, it s one of many, many factors that they look at and it takes into account itself the context of every single case, the current circumstances of the person of concern. that has a lot to do with the level of concern with threat assessment teams and how they go about trying to intervene. and that is a key distinction. it s not in a sense precrime. at least in what i m seen in my reporting, looking into this for months and talking to many people who are doing it. again, what they re trying to do is reall