Public safety requires custody for serious and violent offenders who are a continuing public danger.
Crimes against the public order include a long list of violent crimes, but also the vaguer "causing public danger".
In Sri Lanka and the Theravada countries of Southeast Asia, parittas are traditionally chanted during large public rituals designed to avert collective, public danger.
Utility firms cheating their customers is a disgrace, but if commercial probation services cut corners for profit by monitoring offenders less intensively, that would be a public danger.
More than measuring heightened public danger, the flood of emergency calls underlined Americans' skyrocketing awareness of their own vulnerability to scheming terrorists and hoaxers.
President Roosevelt, in his speech that summer, told America, "All private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger".
If Congress fails, Mr. Obama can act unilaterally, using powers the Environmental Protection Agency has asserted to regulate carbon emissions as a public danger.
It is literally an immuring within prison walls – on the grounds, not of credible public danger, but of imputed morality, or revenge ("a just desert").
Three of the men identified by the prosecutors as ringleaders received terms of "imprisonment for public protection," a sentence that lasts until a parole board judges they no longer pose a public danger.
The only options are to break them up, so that the failure of one of them no longer represents a systemic risk to the financial system, or to regulate them so stringently that they can never pose a public danger.
