The police will in August begin testing a pilot program for compiling data on possibly dangerous persons to prevent future attacks by lone actors, as was seen in the fatal shooting of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the National Police Agency (NPA) said Monday.
The trial follows a series of high-profile attacks against politicians, seemingly devised and carried out by "lone offenders," or people who commit crimes without links to known groups. In addition to Abe's assassination last July, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was also the target of an attack by a lone individual in April.
Given the difficulty of detecting such individuals before they carry out their attacks, the police aim to speed up their ability to respond by gathering and analyzing information on potential future threats to the public.