The other problem too, is who is investigating these threats?? A police officer in uniform coming to a kid’s home and saying “did you post online that you wanted to shoot your classmates?!” is a terrible fucking setup. Police uniforms with all the gear on them are designed to intimidate, I have no problem with that concept. But the combination of intimidating uniform/gear + blunt accusatory question, of fucking course the kid is going to deny it
But send a social worker who begins with building rapport and validating the kid, and all of a sudden you have a whole different interview. “Bullying is so hard to escape these days, it can happen both at school and online now, has this been happening to you? How much has it impacted your life? What are some of the things you think you can do to make it stop?” A kid is still going to have to be fairly dumb to confess to a social worker that they are harboring thoughts of killing others, but let’s face it MOST past school shooters have been fairly dumb kids. And they are more likely to admit it in the second scenario than the first
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