Math Wins Again, Immigrant Terrorist Edition

The folks over at National Review are making predictable hay over the Islamist attack in Berlin wherein the refugee dude drove into a crowd, killing a bunch and injuring more bunches. I think this is unfair and they are missing the point.

Here's one tidbit.

The Daily Mail reports, “He was put on a danger list shortly after arriving in Germany in June last year, which meant authorities considered him prone to extreme violence. Yet just how much surveillance he was under remains unclear.” Wait, somebody can be on a “danger list, prone to extreme violence” and not under surveillance?

Here's another.

His terrorist activities aside, Amri has also been involved in narcotics trafficking, theft, and the torching of a school. That last felony occurred in Italy, where the “refugee” was sentenced to five years in prison before being welcomed into Deutschland. All that baggage, and still the Germans allowed him to remain. Reportedly, officials felt they could not deport him because he did not have a passport and the Tunisian government would not acknowledge him (despite the fact that the Tunisian government had convicted him in absentia of a violent robbery). That might explain a brief delay in repatriating him; it does not explain a legal system that permits a suspect with a lengthy, violent criminal record to remain at liberty while he is suspected of plotting mass-murder attacks.

Emphasis in the original.

European (and American and Western in general) security forces are designed to deal with a relatively small percentage of criminals in our midst and assume a limited criminal support infrastructure. Our laws are designed to protect the citizen from unwarranted surveillance and apprehension by the police. For this reason it takes a lot of resources to follow any particular dude.

As the number of dudes needing surveillance and apprehension increases. if you want to maintain protection of the population, you need to do some combination of these two things.

• Increase the size of your security forces and
• Relax the rules under which they operate, giving them more freedom and your citizens less.

For example, if, under the current rules, Detective Heinrich Mueller can reasonably keep track of 5 jihadis, if you increase the number of jihadis he needs to track to 10 or 15, some of them are going to slip through his fingers. It's not that Detective Mueller is incompetent or the people managing the security forces are soft on terrorism, it's a simple matter of mathematics. Your rules set an upper limit on how many jihadis can be 'managed' per person on the force.

By importing 1,000,000 refugees to Germany alone and allowing Muslims to set up independent city-states within their countries, the Europeans have blown that math problem to bits.

Europe now has a choice: Double or triple the size of their security forces or relax the rules governing their security forces until Germany is less like cool and groovy West Germany and more like rigid police state East Germany.

Mark Steyn had a typically telling quote the other day.

“It’s amazing to me,” he added. “I think this is insane when I listen to people say ‘oh, we’re now going to have to have metal detectors in night clubs, security in nightclubs. Ok, so what happens next? They blow up a bakery, they blow up a little pastry shop, so then you’re gonna have to have metal detectors to get into the pastry shop?”

How many cops will you need to watch every store?