I’m in Canada and it’s only marginally better with respect to police under/overreaction. A friend and I once got the “don’t go to school on X day” message and we went immediately to local, provincial, and federal police. No one took us seriously. We had a friend working at CSIS (American analogue would be CIA) look into it and later that week we saw the article in a local paper.
Police investigated the home and found:
- 5000 rounds of ammunition
- body armor
- explosives
- only thing he couldn’t get was legal firearms because of his history of mental illness, but he had been working on connections to acquire illegal ones
Point being we couldn’t get the police to lift a finger to check out what we believed to be a credible threat (this guy never even joked about that stuff), but boy were they willing to burn rubber racing to my school when I committed the crime of defending myself in a “normal” school fight and one of my bullies claimed they felt threatened by me. This event set off a whole series of events, like requiring me to get a full evaluation at a psychiatric facility, before being allowed back in school. Our system is broken.