I think back over the number of marginal people I’ve met, many of whom are in altered mental states either temporary or permanent, who claim to be secretly Rothschilds, or spurned princes, or reincarnated deities, or representatives of extraterrestrial species… while the long delay in applying technology here delayed the fix to a travesty, I understand why the policy for the routine use of that technology may be what it is.
If anything, I’d be curious how the detective got authorization to apply so much time and so many resources to running this claim to ground.
This is madness. Instead, you have a fairly rigorous process for some form of state-issued ID, and allow using that to reduce friction in every other identification process.
In this case, the identity thief fraudulently obtained a state ID, and later a birth certificate, which really does "start from birth". The institutions that issued him with those probably could have done better, but they can't stop everyone, and they need to make some tradeoffs when demanding documentation from decades ago just to let their citizens participate in society.
How does that work for immigrants?
How does that work for kids of parents who do not care enough to keep track of their kids identity documents?
How dies that work for orphans or children of incarcerated parents of children of homeless addicts who are raised by grandparents or an aunt?
As a teacher, I know the world is not so simple.
Should not matter.
This is the simplest case, there should be plenty of information with child protective services. Just verify some of those facts.
However, it sounds like significant resources went to institutionalizing the person. Maybe that's good for the police who get to take the cost off their books. The government overall is still paying.
No, something more than that went wrong. From the article:
>> The real Woods was arrested and charged with identity theft and false impersonation, under a misspelling of Keirans’ name: Matthew Kierans.
I would bet that Woods did not supply that name to the authorities. (How would he have known it?) It had to have come from Keirans. But that changes the story from "some nut job homeless guy making crazy claims" to "a dispute between two people who know each other".
A US Citizen will be deported to Mexico because they didn't happen to have an ID and the agent just thought he was in the 99.9% of people claiming they are citizens? Then they get stuck in the system and it takes a lot to get back into the country and prove who they are.
Also, and perhaps even more importantly, if you aren't actually checking every time, then you don't actually know what the statistics for delusional vs not are, you're just guessing.
If we put more resources into the system, throwing caution to the wind is much more likely.
Some people go looking for problems, and they find them. Some people don’t, and they don’t. Some people are so uninterested in finding problems that they’ll attack or ‘fix’ people that find them.
The tricky part is making another outcome happen when real life is involved. You’re welcome to try to change it if you like. A lot of people are doing so every day, and it would be even worse without that effort every day.