Prediction research and the emergency commitment of dangerous mentally ill persons: a reconsideration

The author suggests that research on the prediction of violent behavior does not support the unqualified conclusion that the accurate predictions of violence is impossible under all circumstances or that psychiatrists, psychologists, and others will invariably overpredict its occurrence by several orders of magnitude. Further, he suggests that there are theoretical reasons why one could expect that one set of circumstances--those which typically apply in the short-term emergency commitment of mentally ill persons predicted to be imminently violent-- may be exempt from the systematic inaccuracy found in the current research.