The dog that doesn’t bark

How can we know what didn't happen that might have? The Unk-Unks.

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1892 Sherlock Holmes’ short story "The Adventure of Silver Blaze," a critical observation by Holmes was that a dog didn’t bark during a robbery. That was curious said Holmes, because you would have expected it to bark if someone from the outside had been the thief.

I frequently think about how often events don’t happen that might have happened. It’s not quite analogous to the dog that didn’t bark, but it is close.

What am I getting out here? In the news in recent days was the sickening mass murder of 18 men, women and children in Lewiston, Maine. Since then, there have been revelations about the declining mental state of the now-deceased perpetrator and questions about how he had been able to keep his guns despite both the military and police being warned of the danger he posed. The Maine case is probably one of the most explicit examples of rather specific and known warning signs, yet the killings were not prevented.

However, what we don’t know—we can’t know—is when some rampage would have happened but didn’t due to some intervention.

Sometimes saying something may prevent tragedy

In 2017, 18-year-old Jack Sawyer was arrested in Fair Haven, VT, having been reported to the police by a mother who knew Sawyer had a troubled past and had purchased a gun, as well as by a friend, who had heard him talking admiringly of the school massacre in Parkland, Fla. The police found a journal that included disturbing plans for a shooting at the high school. “I’m aiming to kill as many as I can,” the journal read. When arrested, he also had books about the Columbine High School massacre. Similar to the Maine shooter, Sawyer had left a residential program where he had been getting treatment for depression and anxiety and he had stopped taking medication that was prescribed to him.

It can’t be known if, absent his arrest, the young man would have actually pursued his rant. However, all the felony charges against him were ultimately dismissed when the Vermont Supreme Court said Mr. Sawyer’s acts did not meet the legal standards of the most serious charges against him. To constitute an attempted crime, the justices said, someone would have to not only prepare to commit a crime but take clear steps toward carrying it out.

Sawyer’s lawyer told The New York Times:

Jack simply had thoughts about committing these crimes, wrote in his journal about committing the crimes, wrote his fantasy plans, and he purchased a gun,” Ms. Green said. “The average person on the street can understand that all of that is not good, but it’s not an attempted murder.

So, here’s a conundrum, summarized succinctly by Jared Carter, an assistant professor at Vermont Law School, “In this country, typically we criminalize acts — not thoughts."

But we don’t know what would have transpired if no one spoke up

In Fair Haven, of course, we have an example of “see something, say something” that may have prevented tragedy. Or maybe Sawyer would have never acted on his thoughts.

But this notion of whether something might have happened but didn’t goes beyond mass killings.

The scenario if George Floyd lived

I’ve thought about the case of George Floyd. You no doubt recall that a senior Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, was convicted of his murder and three junior officers convicted of less charge associated with abetting Chauvin in his crime. Would Floyd still be alive if the other officers had pulled Chauvin off Floyd within a minute or two of his restraining Floyd? If that had happened, it is not likely there would have been a video of the altercation, as it would have been a somewhat routine take-down. We would never have known that a tragedy had been avoided. We wouldn’t know Floyd’s name.

I did some Googling around the question “What would have happened if the other officers or a bystander pulled Chauvin off of Floyd.”

The responses I found suggest why it’s so simple to see in hindsight what could have prevented a tragedy, but why we could never know about what was, in fact, prevented and why.

If a bystander had intervened:

Most likely:

George Floyd doesn’t die.

Floyd gets charged with a crime.

The bystander gets charged with assaulting an officer during the course of his duty.

We know now that the events of that day led to Floyd’s death. But nobody could say that with certainty then. If a bystander was to charge into Derek Chauvin back, then nobody would ever know that this was the alternative future. So Chauvin would still be a serving police officer….

…and someone might have gone to prison for assaulting a police officer.

If one of the junior officers had intervened:

Truthfully, I expect that officer, especially if it was one of the rookie probationary officers, would be fired. Maybe even charged. You see, Floyd might then be alive, and so the argument that Chauvin was endangering his life might be very difficult to prove.

An officer interceding on behalf of an arrestee when things get out of hand is normal. It happens often and is not taken lightly. In this instance, the senior officer was in charge and the chain of command is strongly taught in police academies. This chain radiates from Chief on down. It would be extraordinary for a junior officer to countermand a senior officer’s actions.

In other words, we wouldn’t have known that Chauvin would have maintained his knee on Floyd for nine minutes. It’s almost a certainty that the event would not have been newsworthy, other than, perhaps, a paragraph on page 3 of the local newspaper that three probationary officers were fired for assaulting a superior officer or a pedestrian was arrested for assault.

Here again, we can’t know when we have been successful in preventing something because that something didn’t happen.

If 9/11 had been prevented

Even 9/11. Suppose the FBI had connected the dots they apparently missed. What if they understood that there were 11 Saudis taking flight lessons and had designs to fly planes into some buildings? Again, it’s unlikely there would have been a headline: “Massive Tragedy Avoided. Thousands of Lives Saved.” First, because I don’t think the FBI would have discovered the full details that the would-be terrorists actually planned to hijack three jumbo jets and fly them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, as opposed to smaller planes for some other nefarious aim. And second, the plot would seem so far-fetched to us and, after all, thwarted, that if it received national attention at all, it might have been a 20-second evening news story of some arrests made and the potential perpetrators deported. It’s not even clear what the student pilots could be charged with. At most conspiracy. Taking flight lessons is not a crime.

When I was with the Program on Information Resources Policy in the early 1980s, my colleague, Tony Oettinger, introduced me to the concept of “unk-unks”, the unknown unknowns.¹ These are things that you didn’t even know that you had to ask about before making a decision or engaging in planning. It might be similar to a later concept, “black swans.” Proving a negative—something that didn’t happen that might have, is trying to know the unknowable.

Yes, “see something, say something.” Nonetheless, we can rarely know what might have been. No doubt there have been many cases where the police or FBI have prevented something awful—but neither they nor we can be sure what didn’t happen. Always the dog that didn’t bark.

1. President Ford’s and later George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, made use of this term. I’m not sure who got it from whom, as Tony had done consulting with both NASA and the Defense Department.