White House Pushing Proposal That Would Subject Mentally Ill People To Increased Surveillance

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the people-with-mental-problems-will-definitely-respond-positively-to-this dept

The White House has decided we’re going to power through our mass shooting crisis by aiming our surveillance apparatus in the direction of the mentally ill. In addition to claiming we might be able to find the next mass shooter by tracking fitness trackers, the administration is pushing for a mental health-based “solution” that would increase the stigma of not being “normal.”

The White House is considering a controversial proposal to study whether mass shootings could be prevented by monitoring mentally ill people for small changes that might foretell violence.

Former NBC Chairman Bob Wright, a longtime friend and associate of President Trump’s, has briefed top officials, including the president, the vice president and Ivanka Trump, on a proposal to create a new research agency called HARPA to come up with out-of-the-box ways to tackle health problems, much like DARPA does for the military, say several people who have briefed.

HARPA (a takeoff of the military’s DARPA project) stands for Health Advanced Research Projects Agency. HARPA’s webpage says things about uncured diseases and promises to “put patients first,” but the administration’s commandeering of its resources pretty much guarantees more law enforcement officers lacking the training to address mental health issues will be put in contact with people with mental health issues more frequently. Perhaps the Trump administration thinks we can avoid a mass shooting by increasing the number of people shot by cops one at a time.

A three-page proposal from HARPA contains a clunky acronym and some very scary ideas. The route to a mass shooting-free America runs through millions of devices owned by millions of US citizens.

Advisers to Wright quickly pulled together a three-page proposal — called SAFEHOME for Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes — which calls for exploring whether technology like phones and smartwatches can be used to detect when mentally ill people are about to turn violent.

No one has any idea how this is supposed to work. No one seems to know whether it can even be done. Administration officials, however, aren’t asking the only question that matters: should this be done?

In addition to generating a massive amount of false positives for law enforcement and HARPA analysts to sort through, there’s the very real concern that such a program would put tons of people under surveillance and still not do anything to solve the problem it’s supposed to be addressing.

Most concerning, [Marisa Randazzo] said, is that the proposal is based on the flawed premise that mental illness is directly linked to mass shootings. “Everything we know from research tells us it’s a weak link at best,” said Randazzo, who spent a decade conducting such research for the Secret Service and is now CEO of a threat assessment company called Sigma.

There is violence associated with mental illness, but not the violence this administration is targeting. Suicide is the problem going unaddressed. But since Trump believes mass shooters are all mentally ill, that’s what HARPA will likely focus on. Unfortunately, it will be working against available data.

[S]tudies of mass shooters have found that only a quarter or less have diagnosed mental illness. Researchers have noted a host of other factors that are more significant commonalities in mass shooters: a strong sense of grievance, desire for infamy, copycat study of other shooters, past domestic violence, narcissism and access to firearms.

It also runs contrary to the government’s own research work. A Pentagon study on mass shootings said simply that prediction-oriented programs don’t work. Threat assessment is far more productive than amassing a bunch of biometric data and hoping to find a pattern that indicates someone’s going to engage in mass murder.

But this is what the administration wants to pursue: widespread surveillance based on the faulty assumption that this will produce anything other than negative results.

Filed Under: gun violence, mass shootings, mental illness, pre-crime, surveillance