Mass killer profiles produce many false positives labeling nonviolent people as violent

Evidence

Researchers try to create a profile of mass killers from case studies of them. Because many of them die by their own hand or by police bullets, researchers have to rely on psychological postmortems to judge a killer’s psychic life and motivation from whatever public information is available. … The problem with such profiles is that they yield high false-positive predictions, with nonviolent individuals being judged as prone to violence. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1280

Categorization

• QUESTION: How does the false-positive problem square with the moral machinery of fear-based policy? If profiles mislabel nonviolent mentally ill, profiling functions more as prejudice legitimization than risk detection.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing claims about ordinary people rationalizing support for restrictive policies — profiling selectively justifies pre-emptive control of already-stigmatized groups. — connects to: Doctored-video fears can cause real violence when victims match the false profile — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 356
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1280