Sixty minutes. That’s how long it took for a private Snapchat message to travel from Kristen Volpe’s phone to the FBI to the deputies standing in her elementary school hallway. On January 29, 2025, the 22-year-old student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois, vented to her boyfriend and two roommates — three people total — after a student closed her laptop mid-class and wiped her lesson plan. She referenced shooting the student or the school. She meant it as a frustrated joke. Snapchat’s algorithm didn’t get the humor.
No student reported her. No parent. No coworker. The flag was entirely automated. Snapchat’s policy permits voluntary emergency disclosures to law enforcement — no warrant required — when the platform determines imminent harm exists. The algorithm makes that initial call. Think of it like your Ring doorbell deciding to call 911 on its own, except the doorbell is reading your text messages.
We wouldn’t know about the acts of violence they stopped, though, would we?
You think authorities wouldnt be on prime time news gloating about stopping attacks before they happened and justifying the privacy destroying bullshit they use as a necessary sacrifice for safety?
Joke aside, every time there were actual review of laws pushed to protect [insert whatever potential victim] from [insert whatever potential threat] at the cost of losing a tiiiiiny bit of freedom, the conclusion is always dire for the said bill/law/mechanism. All countries.
It is never ever about protecting the people.
They’d never let us stop hearing about it if it happened
Sort of the joke in this. Crime in western countries has declined as police hyper-surveillance has increased. I don’t think it is unfair to say that a suffocating perpetual dragnet created by a public-private Big Brother network has contributed to depressed rates of stochastic violence. Or that the few groups capable of committing crimes and getting away with it are the police and sheriffs offices, the individuals in their employment, and the turncoats they use to influence and infiltrate other groups.
We don’t count “preemptively solved crimes”, unless we’re trying to make headlines with “foiled assassination/terrorist plot” to inflate some bureaucrat’s reputation. We also don’t count false positives - people who had their doors kicked in and their family roughed up and their dog shot in the dead of night - when we’re tallying police effectiveness. Out of sight, out of mind.
The only thing we really see is active shooters on the evening news and burglary footage on the local. So we’re always having a “crime problem”. The current police state is never big enough. Surveillance isn’t “real” enough to impact the news cycle, because something is always happening somewhere that can be reported on as the next big Crime Wave.
Crime has been on a significant downturn ever since lead was removed from gasoline, and thus stopped being vaporized in the air.
Are there places where crime spikes upward? yes, but almost 100% of the time thats caused by the failure of local, state, or federal governments creating disadvantaged, poor, underserviced people. . and you treat people poorly and keep them desperate long enough, then crime is going to occur.
They’ll happily spend millions on the crime part, but they wont even acknowledge the underlying issue that could be addressed for far less than what oppression costs.
They did study this. Surveillance makes a lot of sense for parking lots and around houses if there is immediate intervention. Just recording in the street doesn’t do anything.
Yea, seems a bit like survivorship bias. Do I believe this person would’ve done something horrible? No, then again, I don’t know them… But do we hear about every angsty teenager who has gotten reported through something like this? No. Why don’t they flaunt how much they may or may not stop violence? Because you can’t really brag about data that is intirely comprised of “maybe this could possibly have happened i guess”.