The Times Square bomb was reported by a bystander who was on guard (certainly in part) because the media has effectively kept the terrorist threat fresh in our minds.
He noticed that a car was filling up with smoke. Even if had never heard of terrorism before, he still would have called the police because that's what people do when they notice a fire nearby.
pretending like the problem doesn't exist hardly seems like the answer either.
There are 300,000,000 people in the US. On any given day, tens of thousands of them will notice something that looks like terrorism to them. On almost every day of the year, every single one of those tens of thousands of people will be wrong. Completely and totally wrong. As a result, those people will become extremely anxious and will cause law enforcement to waste time and hassle innocent people needlessly.
We need to face facts: the vast majority of people are completely incapable of distinguishing terrorist activity so what they report as suspicious is often nothing but an artifact of their own prejudice. Terrorism has become an excuse to systematically harass out groups. And in the process, we are all made less safe because the police have to investigate these stupid incidents instead of focusing on real crimes.
He noticed that a car was filling up with smoke. Even if had never heard of terrorism before, he still would have called the police because that's what people do when they notice a fire nearby.
pretending like the problem doesn't exist hardly seems like the answer either.
There are 300,000,000 people in the US. On any given day, tens of thousands of them will notice something that looks like terrorism to them. On almost every day of the year, every single one of those tens of thousands of people will be wrong. Completely and totally wrong. As a result, those people will become extremely anxious and will cause law enforcement to waste time and hassle innocent people needlessly.
We need to face facts: the vast majority of people are completely incapable of distinguishing terrorist activity so what they report as suspicious is often nothing but an artifact of their own prejudice. Terrorism has become an excuse to systematically harass out groups. And in the process, we are all made less safe because the police have to investigate these stupid incidents instead of focusing on real crimes.