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FBI calls ‘probability’ that a mass shooting will occur in Spokane ‘absurd’



The FBI in Spokane calls a report that details where, when, and the type of person who will commit the next mass shooting “without merit.”

“There Will Be Another Mass Shooting. This Is What the Data Tell Us About It,” the Atlantic magazine headline reads. The first paragraph of reporter Philip Bump’s story gets specific.



Although he says, “Our sincere hope is that every prediction we made is wrong because no mass killings should happen again,” Bump includes charts and probability arguments to explain what we have learned about mass shootings.





The detail that has a lot of people concerned, including the local FBI, is the Atlantic reporter’s specific date and city location for the next mass shooting.

The date was one of the “more complex calculations” according to the report.

In order to calculate it, we first wanted to figure out how frequently shooting incidents happened. So we figured out how many days passed, on average, between them. Over the past 30 years, that figure is about 222 days – seven months or so. The pace of shootings has increased dramatically recently. Since the first shooting in 2004, incidents have occurred about once every 149 days.


Why Spokane?

Washington state has had far more shootings than its population would predict – five incidents where 1.27 might have been expected, according to his analysis.


“We were therefore willing to pick Washington as the most likely state,” he writes.

An FBI agent in Spokane says the probability study is “without merit.”

Frank Harrill, the FBI supervisory senior resident agent in Spokane, tells the Spokesman Review Newspaper the overly specific details in Bump’s analysis “takes it into the theater of the absurd.”

Bump tells me the point of his article is “to give a better sense of the patterns of such crimes.”

He acknowledges in his article and to me that data can’t predict the specific date and location of a crime like this based on a small set of data.

“There’s no more reason for people in Spokane to be worried than there is for anyone who happens to know a 38 year-old to be on edge,” he says.


“There’s value in that, given the enormous misconceptions about how they occur. As a function of population, Washington has seen more than its share of mass killings,” Bump says. “That’s worth exploring, which is what I was hoping to do.”



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