Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Plan links shootings, mental illness
Subjects would be monitored by tech devices on changes in behavior to predict violence
Proposal to study if shootings could be prevented by monitoring mentally ill people draws criticism.
WASHINGTON — The White House is considering a controversial proposal to study whether mass shootings could be prevented by monitoring mentally ill people for small changes that might foretell violence.
Former NBC Chairman Bob Wright, a longtime friend and associate of President Donald Trump’s, has briefed top officials, including the president, the vice president and Ivanka Trump, on a proposal to create a new research agency called HARPA to come up with out-of-thebox ways to tackle health problems, much like DARPA does for the military, say several people who have briefed.
After the recent shootings in Texas and Ohio, Ivanka Trump asked those advocating for the new agency whether it could produce new approaches to stopping mass shootings, said one person familiar with the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them.
Advisers to Wright pulled together a threepage proposal — called SAFEHOME for Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes — which calls for exploring whether technology like smartphones and smartwatches can be used to detect when mentally ill people are about to turn violent.
Using his personal connections to Trump and others, Wright has pushed his HARPA proposal to the White House and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and several senators and Congress members, according to two people involved in the effort. Last month, on the presidential campaign trail, former Vice President Joe Biden also advocated for creating such an agency.
The mass shooting idea has alarmed experts studying violence prevention, technology, psychology and mental health.
“I would love if some new technology suddenly came along that would help us identify violent risk, but there’s so many things about this idea of predicting violence that doesn’t make sense,” said Marisa Randazzo, former chief research psychologist for the U.S. Secret Service.
Beyond the civil liberty concerns about monitoring people through their gadgets, Randazzo said, there’s the problem of false positives.
Even if the technology could be developed, such a program would likely flag tens, or hundreds of thousands, more possible suspects than actual shooters. How, she asked, would you sort through them? And how would you know you were right, given the difficulty of proving something that hasn’t happened?
Most concerning, she said, is that the proposal is based on the flawed premise that mental illness is directly linked to mass shootings.
“Everything we know from research tells us it’s a weak link at best,” said Randazzo, who spent a decade conducting such research for the Secret Service and is now CEO of a threat assessment company called Sigma.
In recent weeks, President Trump has repeatedly pointed to mental illness as the cause of America’s mass shootings. “Mental illness and hatred pull the trigger. Not the gun,” Trump said immediately after last month’s shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. Federal health officials have taken steps to make sure government experts don’t publicly contradict Trump.
But studies of mass shooters have found that only a quarter or less have diagnosed mental illness. Researchers have noted a host of other factors that are more significant commonalities in mass shooters: a strong sense of grievance, desire for infamy, copycat study of other shooters, past domestic violence, narcissism and access to firearms. Experts note that those with severe mental illnesses are much more likely to be victims than perpetrators.
“To those who say this is a half-baked idea, I would say, ‘what’s your idea?’ ” said Geoffrey Ling, the lead scientific adviser on the HARPA proposal.
A John Hopkins University neurologist, Ling was a founding director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office. Ling said having the gumption to tackle big problems and think creatively is what led to DARPA’s successes.
The idea has backers in both parties. During a Aug. 8 speech at the Iowa State Fair, Biden said creating a HARPA agency could help solve health problems like Alzheimer’s and obesity.
“Those who have been in the military know there’s an outfit called DARPA,” he said. “It’s the thing that allows the military to do advanced research on everything from stealth technology and the internet and all those other things. ...We should be doing the same thing with health care.”
Matthew Nock, a leading suicide researcher at Harvard University, agreed that a new health research arm like HARPA might be helpful. For decades, Nock said he has tried to find ways to predict and prevent suicides. In an email, Nock said he’d welcome an agency that would apply advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence to such efforts.
But he added that using such a proposed agency to “find” links that science has shown don’t exist is “dangerous.” While research shows mental illness is strongly linked to suicide, Nock noted, the link between it and violence toward others is much weaker.
Other researchers pointed to worrisome results from other recent attempts to use artificial intelligence to predict risk of violence.
“The irony is that there are low-tech solutions that already exist for some of these problems that we simply aren’t funding or deploying enough,” said Hart, including research and policies that address the prevalence of guns in America.