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Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why police even accepts anonymous bomb tips. They should respond by requiring the person giving the tip to identify himself.

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Sometimes tips are given by the same people that place the bomb, with a desire to reduce casualties.

I don't know anything about the situation in Russia, but that definitely happened in Northern Ireland.

As I recall, there was at least sometimes a system of passwords so the police could verify the caller was who they said they were, and they'd take the threat seriously.

Because if the tip is non-anonymous, the person making it is automatically the only known suspect.

It's not the difference between anonymous tip and non-anonymous tip, but between anonymous tip and no tip at all, because no one wants to be punished for doing the right thing.

Remember Richard Jewell from the Atlanta Olympics?

It's so sad, but that's why I wrote that protection of the person who called in is crucial. But with cases like this I understand why people don't trust the police with reporting bombs.

Some people don't trust the police with anything at all.

They aren't wrong. Federal circuit judges and the Supreme Court have ruled that police have no duty to protect anyone in particular. They routinely suffer no meaningful negative consequences for serious failures in their work, including killing people who are unarmed, not resisting, and not suspected of committing any crime.

And after the Boston police screwed up the Mooninite promotion for Cartoon Network in 2007... well, it's enough to say that Turner had to pay for and publicly apologize for the police response to their fancy LED-illuminated handbills--absolutely Kafkaesque.

If I ever find a suspicious package, I'll certainly alert bystanders to retreat. I'll pull the firm alarm on my way out. I'll call the firefighters. I'll call the local newspaper and television station newsrooms. I might even call the triage nurse at the nearest ER. But someone else can be the one to call the cops.

A chance that an anonymous bomb tip will turn out to be true is very small. But it's not zero.

Now, for a second, imagine that it really happened. And you're the official who decided "no, we will not act on this". And this decision is in the records. Does this situation look good to you?

It's not the official who decides, it should be a general policy.

If you look at a similar case, in US. SWAT-ting can be anonymous and can destroy lives, the assymetry of the tips and the resources destroyed by a false tip is unacceptable.

The same way for a bomb threat, the officer should act by requiring identification and guaranteeing that it stays private as long as the bomb is real.

OK, but before it can become policy, some official or officials have to make it so.

Those officials then have to get reelected.

That's usually easier when your opponents can't make legitimate-sounding claims that the policies you've instituted led to a bombing.

The official wouldn't make the decision on a whim. He'd have risk assessments, policy documents and what not to back him up.

In the IRA's campaign in the mainland UK in the 1970s, they would provide a codeword along with the tip, after the first bomb the receivers would know that subsequent calls with the same codeword were legitimate.

The police want to avoid this scenario:

IDIOT ANCHORPERSON COVERED IN MAKEUP: Breaking News: We've just learned that the bombing that killed 152 people in the Podunk Shopping Mall today was known in advance to the police, but they did nothing to inform the public! Now to our reporter on the scene.

LOSER IN A SUIT: Hi, this is Rob Harasser, coming to you live from the Podunk Police Headquarters. This is Detective A. Buser Skeptic. Detective Skeptic, I understand you got a call this morning before the bombing?

WIFE-BEATER IN A MUSTACHE: Yeah, someone called me this morning. It was hard to hear them, but they said a lot of people would die in the mall today. I asked who was calling and they hung up.

LOSER: Did they say they were going to bomb it?

WIFE-BEATER: Yeah, they did say something about "a bomb", but I couldn't hear them clearly.

LOSER: Did you trace the line?

WIFE-BEATER: I did. You know, people think that if they hang up fast enough, we can't trace calls, but that's not true anymore. Even though they called the non-emergency number, I knew where they were calling from in ten minutes. It was a payphone outside the mall. Did you know there are still payphones outside the mall?

LOSER: Why didn't you warn people?

WIFE-BEATER (looking sad): I thought it was some kid playing a joke.

PANCAKE-THICK MAKEUP FACE: Well, there you have it, folks. The police knew, and they didn't tell us.

That was a lot of effort for such an odd, empty, dialogue.

Do you agree with me about what would happen in a case like this, and just think I've explained it badly? Or do you disagree with my actual reasoning, and if so, what do you think would happen instead?

It's a decent illustration of how nobody in that emergent clusterfuck is particularly noble.

When all of the characters in the dialogue are named so ignobly from the start, it kind of forces the narrative...

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