Should we spy on the mentally ill? Of course not. But in the aftermath of tragedy, level-headed policymaking often goes out the window.

Unfortunately, this is currently the case in President Trump’s White House. In the wake of several recent mass shootings, the Trump administration is grasping at straws trying to come up with a solution to gun violence that may just not exist.

According to the Washington Post, “The White House is considering a controversial proposal to study whether mass shootings could be prevented by monitoring mentally ill people for small changes that might foretell violence.”

The proposal was called SAFEHOME, which stands for Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes.



It included calls for examining the potential of monitoring mentally ill through their phones and smartwatches.https://t.co/uex49WmQ1H — Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) September 9, 2019

The plan, suggested by Trump associate Bob Wright, would create a new research branch of the federal government, and explore “whether technology including phones and smartwatches can be used to detect when mentally ill people are about to turn violent.” Per the Post, proponents have dubbed this proposal SAFEHOME, an acronym for Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes.

This is, frankly, scary. Mass surveillance of mentally handicapped individuals would do nothing to stop mass shootings, and it would further stigmatize mental illness and endanger the constitutional rights of all Americans.

For one, we must dispense with the myth that mentally ill people are dangerous. Only about a quarter of mass shooters have a diagnosable mental illness, so mass suspicion of the millions of people with various mental health issues is in no way an appropriate response to mass shootings. According to MentalHealth.gov:

The vast majority of people with mental health problems are no more likely to be violent than anyone else. Most people with mental illness are not violent and only 3%–5% of violent acts can be attributed to individuals living with a serious mental illness. In fact, people with severe mental illnesses are over 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population.

So plans that scapegoat and target the mentally ill simply aren’t well-founded. But they would have disturbing implications for the constitutional rights of everyday Americans who happen to live with disorders such as depression or anxiety.

For one, how does the government decide to spy on? Arbitrary lists are rife for abuse. And what about false positives? This proposal would likely result in hundreds of thousands of innocent people getting caught up in government surveillance out of unsubstantiated fear that they might do something in the future.

This is the kind of abuse the Fourth Amendment was specifically intended to prevent.

I spoke with the Cato Institute’s Trevor Burrus , a lawyer and constitutional studies scholar who is the editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. He warned me of the ample problems with this plan:

The vast majority of mass shooters would not and did not qualify as mentally ill before they committed their crimes, and only in rare instances did anyone raise concerns about their behavior. Moreover, even when concerns were raised, such as in the Parkland shooting, law enforcement failed to take adequate action. Using invasive technologies to identify potential mass shooters not only promises to be a failure — we do not yet have the technology to replicate the film Minority Report’s “precrime unit” — but it will deplete law enforcement’s resources by sending officials on wild goose chases to track down the huge amount of false positives that such a system will inevitably deliver.

Burrus is right: This is an abysmal idea. Trump deserves credit for his outside-of-the-box approach to governance, in that he’s not rigidly ideological and is willing to consider unorthodox solutions. But some thinking is outside-the-box for good reasons. In this case, he should resist that impulse and reject this misguided proposal emphatically.