My Calling Is Profiler [EN]: Chapter 164

“If he were the real culprit, I would have seen conviction or stubbornness, not those emotions.”

From his perspective, he would either keep his mouth shut until the job was done, or buy time for his colleagues to notice the warning signs and evacuate.

In such cases, the emotion a person shows would be a kind of stubbornness or conviction, not confusion and fear.

“But grabbing his head, suddenly crying, or shouting means he can’t control his stress.”

The possibility of such a person being a terrorist is not high.

“But in the current situation, only a very few people know the Vice President is coming. Even within the school, it’s only some of the faculty.”

“Does he know about it too, then?”

“Yes, the Vice President’s daughter is in the math department.”

“Ah…….”

He figured he might know since the Vice President’s daughter was studying under him.

“Tsk.”

Park Do-joon watched this, then took a sip of his coffee and said,

“This looks like you’ve fallen into a confirmation bias [the tendency to favor information that confirms existing beliefs or biases] error.”

“What do you mean?”

“The one who singled out Professor Alam Salco wouldn’t be a profiler… it would be the security detail, right?”

“How did you know that?”

“There’s a Korean saying: ‘You see as much as you know.’ To put it the other way around, you see according to what you know.”

Roy McCoy frowned, not understanding what he meant.

Lee Ji-soo, who was next to him and also didn’t know the situation, lowered her voice and asked Park Do-joon.

“Senior, what does that mean?”

“It’s like this. We think the target is the Vice President, right? But, do we have any evidence?”

Roy McCoy’s face hardened at those words.

“You don’t think so?”

“No.”

“No, then you’re saying it’s a random terror attack?”

“That’s unlikely. There’s no reason for terrorist groups to come all the way here to commit a senseless terror attack, is there?”

“But then there’s no reason to come……”

Roy McCoy couldn’t understand Park Do-joon’s words.

Park Do-joon gave Roy McCoy a bitter smile.

*Well, he’s just a profiler, not a person in charge of practical matters, so he wouldn’t know much about the process… so he must have made this mistake too.*

“Roy McCoy, you’re not in charge of presidential security, are you?”

“No, I’m with the FBI.”

“Then do you know the security process for VIPs?”

“You mean the President?”

“No, I mean VIPs as they are called. Those under protection.”

VIP doesn’t just mean the President. If that were the case, they would just call them the President, not VIP.

In security operations, the VIP is the ultimate protectee. The VIP can be the President or Vice President, a minister, a senator, or a foreign dignitary.

“I don’t know the details, but the process is probably similar.”

Searching for explosives around the area, searching for ambushes, checking and occupying sniper positions around the area, and so on. There may be differences in intensity, but the process is almost the same.

“You know it well?”

“Ah, when I joined the army, the President came to the training camp.”

“Oh, really? You actually saw the President?”

“Saw, my ass……”

*I clearly heard that the purpose of the President’s visit to the training camp was to commend the hard work of the trainees, but for safety reasons, all the trainees were locked up in the barracks, and instead of the trainees, the cadre, assistant instructors, and even junior officers who were short on numbers had their heads shaved and pretended to be trainees to perform the inspection.*

‘If that’s the case, why did he come…….’

The important thing is not that the President came at that time.

“The important thing is that we know the Vice President is coming, so we naturally assumed that the terrorists are targeting the Vice President.”

“That’s right.”

“But the culprit may think that it doesn’t matter who the VIP is.”

“Yes?”

Lee Ji-soo didn’t understand the words and asked again, but Roy McCoy, who had a lot of experience, understood immediately.

“Someone saw the search and inspection and thought a VIP was coming?”

“That’s right.”

From the terrorist group’s point of view, whoever the VIP is, if they succeed in killing him, they can prove their existence and at the same time put the United States in trouble.

For example, what if it was a foreign dignitary? What if he was shot and killed in the United States? What would happen to the relationship between the two countries?

It would probably be a mess.

What if it was the Speaker of the Senate? Of course, the National Assembly would pounce on the current president and government to trample them down.

“For terrorist groups, it doesn’t matter who the visiting VIP is.”

“Oh, my……”

“But it’s different from our point of view. We know the Vice President is coming. Naturally, our attention will be directed to the Vice President, and we will start looking for people who would know that information.”

The conclusion they reached was Professor Alam Salco. He knew the Vice President was coming, and he was the daughter’s professor.

“I usually call this information overload.”

“Information overload?”

“We’re the police. We’re bound to have more information than the culprit. But when we judge that the culprit also knows the information we know, then the profiling itself gets twisted. That’s why we have to check how much the culprit knows. It’s not easy, though.”

“That’s right. That’s surprisingly important. If this is the case…… the number of investigation targets will increase tremendously.”

They may not know that the Vice President is coming, but rumors would have spread that an important person is coming. They would have been rummaging around the entire university for the past few days.

There are research labs, lecture rooms, and even dormitories in locations where the event hall can be seen, so they would all be subject to search.

“It would be strange if they didn’t know someone was coming.”

In that case, the suspects would be the majority of students, staff, and visitors who saw the search scene, not just a small number of people who knew about the Vice President’s visit.

The scope of suspicion becomes absurdly large.

“But you said confirmation bias earlier, right?”

“Yes, we know the Vice President is coming. So we must have selectively chosen information related to that.”

Confirmation bias refers to setting an answer in advance and securing related data. To put it simply, if there are two answers, A and B, to a problem, if you get caught in confirmation bias, you only selectively choose evidence that answer A is correct and discard evidence or data that fits answer B.

This confirmation bias appears frequently.

“The police are the same right now.”

They investigate thinking, ‘A is a thief,’ and in the process, they only selectively choose evidence that A is a thief and discard evidence that he did not steal.

“It often breaks out in political incidents.”

They know he is innocent, but because he cannot be innocent, the investigative group deliberately discards evidence of innocence.

“Because the submission of evidence is the prosecutor’s area.”

Legally, prosecutors are not allowed to hide evidence that is favorable to the defendant, but Park Do-joon smiled bitterly because he had never seen a prosecutor who kept that.

He had never seen a place where confirmation bias was so rampant as in the modern legal world.

“But why did you say that the Presidential Security Service made that suggestion earlier?”

“The Presidential Security Service is in charge of the Vice President’s security. Of course, as far as they know, the target can only be the Vice President. They naturally judged that the target was the Vice President and unknowingly discarded or ignored evidence related to him.”

“That’s right. There’s also the problem of power struggles.”

The Homeland Security Agency, the FBI, and the Presidential Security Service all clash with each other when these problems arise. Naturally, power struggles occur.

“The problem is that the Homeland Security Agency and the FBI are less directly involved.”

Of course, they have a responsibility to prevent terrorism, but the biggest organization that is held responsible when it fails is the security service.

“In these cases, their opinions are most often applied.”

“Ugh, that’s right.”

Roy McCoy also agreed with those words. As a result, they must have brought Professor Alam Salco in at their request.

“In this case, we have to create a new profiling from the beginning……”

But there are too many targets. The United States has suffered a lot from Middle Eastern terrorists, but that doesn’t mean they completely block the social activities of Middle Eastern people.

Of course, there are many Middle Eastern international students and American Middle Eastern students at this school.

“Furthermore, if they have joined hands with homegrown terrorists, the number increases even more.”

Park Do-joon said that there was a high possibility of homegrown terrorists, and in fact, that is how it is being judged internally.

“Should we catch the perpetrator first, then?”

If there is no time and the perpetrator cannot be identified, they must first catch that side and prevent damage. But the problem is that you don’t know what the guys who escaped will do after that.

Of course, Lee Ji-soo thought that was the best option.

“That’s ultimately the worst-case scenario, though.”

It’s a better choice than missing everything.

“Well, there is a way.”

“There is a way?”

“Doesn’t the school have a risk group management system?”

“Ah, that’s right.”

“Homegrown terrorists are ultimately the result of dissatisfaction with reality developing. And when their grievances become identified with terrorists, they work with them.”

Lee Ji-soo was puzzled by those words and asked.

“What is a risk group management system?”

“Ah, it’s a program that intensively manages students in dangerous situations who are likely to commit suicide or cause accidents within the school.”

“Yes? Why?”

Lee Ji-soo didn’t understand it.

“Is that the depression treatment program?”

“That’s part of it, but it’s more active and diverse. This involves the lives of many people. Well, it’s not perfect, though.”

“It’s a program that was created recently, but you know it well.”

“Well, somehow……”

“Please explain it to me.”

“Um, it’s simple. The United States is a country with freedom of guns. So there are so many ways to not die alone [a euphemism for mass shootings].”

“Ah…….”

Lee Ji-soo understood immediately at those words. School shootings in the United States are a serious problem that occurs every year. It’s not just once or twice a year. Shootings occur in middle schools, high schools, and even universities.

The socially isolated perpetrator purchases a gun to take revenge. He returns to school and indiscriminately kills people.

Most of the time, the result is just being shot to death after a gunfight.

“So the United States has created a program to prevent that.”

“In the end, it’s a mess because of a lack of budget, though.”

“Yes? Isn’t it a Cheonjo country [a Korean term for a country with a huge budget]?”

“A Cheonjo country…… Well, I heard that’s what Korea calls it? But the United States is not a country overflowing with money.”

They say it’s a ‘Cheonjo country’ because it spends ‘1,000 trillion won’ on defense alone, but that’s all made up by taking it out of welfare expenses.

In fact, welfare in the United States is so bad that people who lived in Korea and went to the United States describe it as hell.

Compared to welfare in Korea, it’s really hell. Just looking at the quality of the food provided to students, it’s so poor that people say it’s real dog food.

The level is so bad that it’s hard to find warm food in the cafeterias of American public schools. The reality is that most of the time, they roughly heat instant food in a double boiler because there are not enough people or ingredients to boil and cook something.

“The purpose of the program itself is good, but there is no money to run it.”

“But they must have obtained some information about at-risk students, right?”

“We should go there first.”

At Park Do-joon’s words, Roy McCoy took Park Do-joon to the school right away. And inside the school, there was a small office where related data was organized.