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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

The officer who took the call quickly located the woman, but she denied having suicidal thoughts, the police report said. Even so, the officer believed she might harm herself and told the woman that she must go to a hospital — either voluntarily or in police custody.

It’s an imperfect predictor and Facebook will make a mistake which will eventually be followed by a police shooting. After all, how many stories have been published of police called for mental health issues that resulted in the shooting of the person the caller was worried about.

I hope the programmers are ready to explain how it worked because I get the feeling the family’s attorney is going to have an easy time with black boxes, machine learning, and no true tracing of why.

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Regardless of the reasons for the call, can you really pursue damages from someone who made a good faith call to emergency services?

The only legal issue I could see is violation of privacy, but I bet their EULA covers them there.

Now, if they screw up bad enough, I could see it precipitating some new legislation that they might not like. Until then, I think they're in the clear.

It's another one of those situations where everyone is incentivized to "do something" whether it's actually helpful or not. "Student dies after symptoms of suicidal depression went ignored" is a splashy headline. "Student unable to graduate after involuntary psychiatric detention" is not.

Google "a bias for action" and you'll see it defended as something good.

As litigious as our society is. And having been involved in wrongful death suits in a previous line of work(firefighter/emt). When somebody is looking for money the swath of people who get sued is as long and as wide as it takes to find deep enough pockets to get some money.

Facebook isn’t exactly the most trusted and liked company right now. So they are exactly the type of entity a lawyer would love to get in a court room.

Regardless of the reasons for the call, can you really pursue damages from someone who made a good faith call to emergency services?

Yes, you can try to sue for anything. Also, yes, because the lawyer will try to show it was not "good faith" but a failure of software that caused the tragedy. I'm sure the discovery stage will yield enough to make it painful for Facebook. The current feelings about Facebook are going to come up.

A EULA will not protect you from the families of dead people.

> Yes, you can try to sue for anything.

Point taken.

> the lawyer will try to show it was not "good faith" but a failure of software

AFAIK, the phone calls are being placed by Facebook employees, not software. Presumably, these employees have to look at the actual post content to even be able to make a coherent phone call. You would have to argue either that the employee was incompetent, or that the employee was coerced into making an inappropriate call.

What’s the chance that the employees are licensed social workers or psychologists? Also, the software used in the initial data mining is going to come up. I expect discovery is going to be really painful.

This sounds like swatting.

Didn't think of it that way, but yes it could escalate into a unintentional swatting-style situation. I'm betting some newspaper will call it just that when the first tragedy happens.

Maybe the police should stop shooting people...

Google "suicide by cop", it's a real thing.

And notice how it's not really a thing in Europe, where the cops choose to not constantly shoot people.

People are unarmed in Europe, so shooting at them is almost never necessary. Meanwhile, the cops in America are constantly one pull of the trigger from their early grave, which I imagine is incredibly stressful and also, in fear of their lives, makes them more likely to assess ambigous situations as life-threatening. Compared to most of Europe, I imagine being an US cop is closer to serving in a war zone.

Regular reminder that "Europe" is a big place, including such countries as Switzerland where guns at home are a normal part of military service. Several other countries have strong hunting cultures too.

Regarding Switzerland, IIRC, since 2007, reserve/militia soldiers can keep their guns at home, but not ammunition.

Germany has armed cops and a lot of hunters, and fairly high gun ownership rate for Western Europe. Still police practices a policy of deescalation, rarely fires their guns and basically never kills anybody.

Proper training of police (years, not weeks) and a policy of deescalation have at least as big an effect as rates of gun ownership

> People are unarmed in Europe, so shooting at them is almost never necessary.

Has it occurred to you that cause and effect are non-obvious?

AIUI part of the reason most UK police does not carry a gun is precisely a policy of de-escalation — if the police doesn’t carry a gun, criminals don’t feel the need to match their firepower. Inversely, the fact that American law inforcement treats their beat like a warzone probably contributes to an escalation of violence on the other side too.

Same concept different application: escaping prison isn’t a crime in Germany. You will still be chased by law enforcement to serve the rest of your sentence but the act of running away isn’t a crime unto itself. This means an escapee is likely to avoid committing further crimes on their way out to avoid worsening their sentence, while an American escapee, facing a large penalty for escape itself, is likelier to take an in for a penny, in for a pound approach.

> if the police doesn’t carry a gun, criminals don’t feel the need to match their firepower.

I'm not convinced. Committing crimes, esp. robberies, is much easier with guns. Not to mention that a lot of criminals are involved in intra- an intergang relations and in such environment, a drug dealer without a gun (for example) wouldn't last very long.

I think in America, it is too late. The arms race between police and criminals has gone on for too long. If police stop carrying guns, criminals aren't going to magically stop carrying the guns they already have.

This got me searching, and it appears the US is the only country where there are more civilian-owned firearms than there are civilians.[1]

It seems reasonable then that this might weigh in as an occupation stressor for police officers.

Especially considering unregistered firearms outnumber registered firearms by 392:1.

In 2013 ... there were 33,636 deaths due to "injury by firearms" (10.6 deaths per 100,000 persons). These deaths consisted of 11,208 homicides, 21,175 suicides.[1]

Approximately 1.4 million people have died from firearms in the U.S. between 1968 and 2011.[2]

That’s approximately ten times the number of soldiers who died in the American War of Independence.[3]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War

Criminals in Europe also have guns, anyone can trivially fedex these over from the US and you’ll maybe lose 1-2% of the guns you ship.

I’m not convinced that someone that’s willing to shoot a police officer would be unwilling to smuggle weapons internationally.

Guns also get stolen all the time in Europe, yet we still manage.

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