Imagine an FBI agent looking at evidence of Timothy McVeigh at a gun show in 1994. He's selling a flare gun he claims can 'shoot down an ATF helicopter' and ATF hats with bullet holes in them.
When interviewed without charge, imagine McVeigh claims that it's part of his LARPing activities.
What standards would you suggest that agent applies, in order to avoid a false negative?
I don't see how this document would help find criminals and help free innocents. It seems to give way too rigid guidelines that will be misused by many officers.
By the rubric this document suggests, McVeigh would have satisfied 0 / 10 LARPing signals in Table 1.
> Imagine an FBI agent looking at evidence of Timothy McVeigh at a gun show in 1994. He's selling a flare gun he claims can 'shoot down an ATF helicopter' and ATF hats with bullet holes in them.
Not "Imagine an FBI agent looking at Timothy McVeigh building pipe bombs in private". I don't see how this document would have helped stop McVeigh.
Maybe this doc helps them sort the wheat from the chaff, because the agent doesn't actually know anything about LARP groups.
And this seems accurate as the ratio of larping to terrorism is probably millions to one.
Thousands of people larp every day in the US. Terrorism is fairly rare with maybe a few events per year.
The only people who make that claim are terrorists.
So maybe this is another case of terrorists just being stupid.
Or I expect that GP had some sort of brain fart, disagreed with my statement, and typed the first version of “nuh uh” they came up with.
I made the statement because according to statista [0] there were only 149 terrorist acts in North America from 2007-2022.
That seems fairly rare to me.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/489581/terrorist-attacks...
Presumption of innocence does not extend to the initiation of an investigation, but comes into play with increasingly invasive methods (and ultimately, charges).
US law enforcement is empowered to initiate duck investigations on things that quack pretty liberally.
If your in some group that reenacts pointing weapons at each other, or coming up with idea on how to blow up buildings and you have someone overhear this and report it, law enforcement themselves have no idea if you're the real thing our not (statistically, no your not, but investigators deal with outliers all day every day). If there is some kind of audio or video evidence saying something actionable (even though it may be pretend) and that gets in front of a judge, expect a warrant to get issued to tap into just about every part of your life.
This is not the standard actually applied to law enforcement in the US. You can be convicted of nothing other than resisting arrest. Resisting arrest for what? Literally does not matter.
Also if you are arrested and found innocent, you are not compensated in any way for that arrest, which was clearly wrongful. Police in general are simply exempt from unlawful detention, except in cases of a well connected individual.
Not only that, there are likely fees and fines.