I know it can look like making excuses for the perpetrator, which I'm not intending to do, but having just seen (as I suspected, and possibly predicted) that the man who murdered three people in Nottingham WAS known to mental health services, and that a “series of errors and misjudgments” led to his discharge, and eventual offending, I find myself wondering whether this might also turn out to be a similar case.
Of course, we don't know that the same will apply here, but there's an awful lot of "errors and misjudgements" around cases like these, and one wonders whether, had they been better managed, how many people might not end up experiencing injury and death at their hands.
Societally, we must surely bear some of the responsibility for failing to prevent people who have already demonstrated behaviours of concern from inflicting them on innocent people.
However, what I think we will see is the usual circling of wagons, platitidinous "lessons will be learned" phrases being bandied around, and absolutely nothing done to change the actual situation on the ground.
