I'm actually not surprised law enforcement is slightly behind overall. Certain western police segments are better. I think this would have gone differently in Canada. This is fairly recent still, a 2013 phenomenon.
The thing I'm pondering lately about the whole GG situation is that at its heart, it's a problem of one against many. A faceless many. There's one target, or a handful, on one side and then a vastly multitudinous cast of super-ego-driven, supposedly wronged, masked male figures, who probably rotate in and out of throwing jabs and pulling shit like doxxing on a regular basis. It's a few people vs a digitally manifested, angry, sentiment, or set of worldview frames. You can cut off a tentacle every so often but it's essentially Cthulu; to even gaze at it for very long will undoubtably cause madness.
When all of that went down I could barely comprehend what was even happening. It's a snowball, a constellation actually, of satellite issues with "fuck women" at it's core. The way it sparked with the Quinn story was like a bunch of conditions being met at once and the beast was born.
The extra shit topping on this soufflé is that enforcement will always be behind, the new weird bad thing has to occur for us to even recognize that this new weird bad thing can even happen, to ELI5.
i apologize for leaving metaphors all over the place.
I think the clear takeway is people should stop expecting law enforcement to actually deal with this. Even if they improve in some respects, they'll never be equipped to deal with internet hate mobs, especially as a lot of it isn't strictly a criminal matter.
I'd say more pressure and time should be put at the feet of Twitter, Facebook, and the likebecause without these platforms to organize and broadcast, the mob's power is effectively reduced. Twitter doesn't need to worry about the legality of threats, it's their own service and they can run it as they please, and it's far easier to ban users than it is to trace an IP address and prove a person typed what was written.