ASYLUM

* Never Could Get The Hang Of Thursdays

(This post delayed a few days. Busy long weekend.)

You can tell it's Thursday; there are police everywhere. Of course, if current trends continue, it's next Thursday they ought to worry about. But nonetheless, there were three police outside the train station this morning, a further four on the platforms, two on the concourse at the other end, five by the steps into the Underground, a handful more (with dogs) in the ticket hall, more at the other end, and yet more in a van across the road from our office. I lost count somewhere around 25 or so — compared to an estimated 3-4 total yesterday.

Apparently they are on high alert, but "not in response to any specific information".

In other words, it's Thursday.

This used to be at least slightly reassuring — before the whole shoot-to-kill policy came in. Maybe (note: not 'yes', but 'maybe') in Israel or Iraq where this shit happens every day, but we've only had one successful attack (or four, depending on whether you count them as one big attack or not) ever. One 'Major Incident' to sweep aside hundreds of years of innocent until proven guilty and trial by jury. We abolished the death penalty decades ago.

Yet we have people being gunned down and it doesn't even make sense: surely it's just going to push bombers into using "dead man's triggers"? It's not like that's high-tech fancy-pants technology, there.

(Yet they are concerned, in fact at every opportunity the spectre is trotted out, of bombs detonated remotely by cellphone. A far fancier technology, and one that's not being used — the Madrid bombings, though cellphone-triggered, were not remote: The cellphone's alarm function was used, like an over-engineered egg-timer. No signal was sent. One of the attacks failed because the attacker set the alarm for PM instead of AM. So blocking cellphone signals is a stupid waste, and possibly a fatal one if it prevents trapped passengers from contacting the emergency services. Dumb dumb dumb — especially when the bombers have shown themselves quite willing to blow themselves up anyway, no remotes required.)

Thing is, suicide bombings are really just not that likely. Road traffic accidents kill vastly more people all the time. Yet in the course of two weeks after July 7th, the police dealt with 250 suicide-bomber false alerts.

Yes, two hundred and fifty. Or, nearly twenty every day.

Note, that's not 250 suspect packages — those happen all the time, since long before the attacks. Someone mislays their luggage, and before you know it, everyone's evacuated and it's raining cotton-panty & union-jack-t-shirt confetti.

No, this is 250 occasions where someone not only decided, "That person is suspiciously like a suicide bomber," but was convinced enough that the police were alerted and they took action — only to find that it was a false alert. 17.8 times a day.

And on seven of those occasions, they reached the point of deciding, "Do we shoot this person seven times in the head or not?"

Unca Bruce is fond of noting that people are really bad at judging unusual dangers:

If there are a few shark attacks in Florida — and a graphic movie — suddenly every swimmer is worried. (More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk.)" — http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0505.html#3

So, while I can understand that worrying you might let someone go, and they might go on to blow up lots of people, weighs heavily on you in that kind of position... it's just really fucking unlikely. And we need to act accordingly.

Update: And now it's revealed that, as suspected, many police have been taken off of serious investigations. Some are working on the case itself, which makes sense, but some are just standing around train stations being "high visibility", and work on solving or preventing murders, kidnappings and organised crime has suffered as a result.

Update 2: And this bullshit just sickens me.

Update 3: More risk-analysis: Tube passenger numbers drop 30% — but only at weekends. In other words, the people in the most "danger", who face it every day, and during rush-hour when a bomb is most likely to be set to go off, keep using the tube. The out-of-towners who don't really know London and just watch the news, are staying away in droves. :P