SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
How can we understand the process by which an attack type popularized in the West Bank became the tactic of choice for a white supremacist in the United States? The best way to do so—and to predict the spread of new tactics—may come from an unconventional source: epidemiology, the science of the spread of disease.
[...] Just as in epidemiology, where an outbreak in one area triggers concern in neighboring regions, so too should an outbreak in one operational area serve as a warning to other, geographically related areas. Thus, at this point the outbreak in Israel should have indicated the likelihood that the tactic would spread, at least elsewhere in the region. Here an understanding of vectors is key. A fairly broad definition of a vector is that it is a carrier that transmits a given infectious agent between organisms.
[...] Employing an epidemiological perspective will give security forces and operational planners more time to prepare for the arrival of the tactic and may ultimately save lives. Understanding when the prevalence of a tactic has reached outbreak levels can provide a warning to other operational environments. Monitoring vectors can provide warning of how and where a tactic may spread and whether it is likely that the tactic will reach pandemic or hyperendemic proportions. Even if epidemiological language is not employed, there is still value in an epidemiological approach to describing the prevalence and media coverage of tactics in operating environments.
VEHICLE RAMMING, FROM THE MIDDLE EAST TO CHARLOTTESVILLE: HOW DO TACTICS SPREAD?
(Score: 3, Touché) by VLM on Thursday March 15 2018, @02:26PM
Might want to invest in cops who do their jobs, unlike the Charlottesville police who are apparently corrupt and ineffective based on what I've read.
If you're trying to create an "incident" you couldn't do better than the cops did. Its hard to have an incident of people being run over if the local cops are not intentionally, with malice and preplanning, mixing cars and pedestrians.
There are precedents; its possible to create a very complicated and extremely expensive process to detect truck bombers before they blow; it turns out the simplest, most reliable, and cheapest way to protect national monuments in Washington DC is not to mix giant trucks (full of something?) with monuments. They could have a perpetual budget of billions of dollars and historical failures, but separating monuments/pedestrians from vehicles seems to have worked pretty well for very little money.
Another precedent; the local county grounds hosts city fireworks on the 4th, they have so many pedestrians they close the parking lot to cars and fill the parking lot with pedestrian viewers. Oddly enough it doesn't take many cops to do that if they're actually trying to do their jobs of protect and serve instead of the opposite; and nobody ever gets run over in the dark in the county grounds parking lot.