Recreating Mabel Mora’s look for Halloween this year was simple. All it took was a mini skirt, a sweater, some gold hoops, and knitting needles—items I already had lying around my apartment.

Slipping into costume as the youngest member of Only Murders in the Building’s trio of amateur detectives—who, for three seasons now, have been nosing and podcasting their way through the suspicious deaths that conveniently keep occurring in their Upper West Side apartment building—is easy, I suspect, by design.

That’s because Mabel Mora (played on the Hulu show by Selena Gomez) is meant to personify a face in the crowd—one of countless creators responsible for the very real true crime boom we’re living through.

Only Murders, like the also-recently-renewed Peacock comedy Based on a True Story, is a self-referential take on a current explosion of amateur sleuths. Nine years ago, journalist Sarah Koenig’s acclaimed investigative podcast Serial helped launch this era of everyday people attempting to solve hot and cold cases, sharing their findings along the way to an eager public through documentaries, docuseries, podcasts, and more.

That we’ve become so enmeshed in true crime, however, should give us pause.

As much as I’m a fan of Only Murders, the rise of this new meta-commentary subgenre is more proof of how ubiquitous the genre has become. And for all its promise, a significant amount of true crime remains focused on propagating stories that exploit pain for entertainment and warp narratives around crime and justice.

How we got here dates back, in part, to victims’ rights efforts that began in the 1970s. In Savage Appetites, the writer Rachel Monroe traces our modern taste for true crime to a tangled Frankensteining of feminist rhetoric and tough-on-crime policy. Though the victims’ rights movement identified serious failures of the justice system to protect crime victims, in the decades that followed, it went on to push legislation that disproportionally and devastatingly impacted people of color, from mandatory minimum sentencing to “three strikes” laws.

To understand our current moment, though, it’s also instructive to look further back, to 1800s England, when the first true crime boom launched the popular culture conception of the amateur detective.

These early sleuths emerged out of a climate similar to the one we’re living in today, with a rise of ascendent technologies and media mixed with fear and anxiety around crime, policing, and punishment.

The 1800s saw radical changes in British society, as industrialization dramatically shifted population centers from rural areas to urban cores. With rising urbanization came the modernization of law enforcement; the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 created a standardized police system to replace the existing patchwork network of parish constables and town watchmen. The development of “the new police” was greeted with wariness: Would a centralized system prevent and detect crime, or assert more government control over working-class Londonites?

Alongside the new police force came new ways of gathering evidence. Although ancient forensic practices date as far back as China circa 425 BCE, the 19th century ushered in scientific approaches such as blood analysis, photographic documentation, fingerprint identification, and more. Modern forensics became a point of fascination among the public. They “demanded to know what methods were being used to solve crimes and took an avid interest in how such methods were applied,” scholar Sharon J. Kobritz wrote in her research exploring detective fiction as a natural outgrowth of the Victorian period.

A booming press reported on all of this. But the tenor of what was printed varied widely. Some of it was critical, like Charles Dickens’ early nonfiction work around incarceration. In 1836’s “A Visit to Newgate,” he documented intolerable conditions inside the notorious London prison, which would help inform later fictional works of social criticism like Little Dorrit.

Then there were the endless sensationalist takes emphasizing the gruesome and horrific.

The 1830s invention of the penny press fueled this tabloid-like coverage, which helped advance the unfounded belief that London was experiencing an explosion in violent crime and murder. (Crime rates actually dropped between the 1840s and the 1870s.) In “Common Misperceptions: The Press and Victorian Views of Crime,” historian Christopher A. Casey argued that such perceptions had chilling real-world consequences. From the 1820s into the middle of the century, early crime reformers had standardized the system and made it less harsh. But fear-mongering in the press provoked a sharp reversal of course, leading “directly to a re-evaluation of contemporary criminal policy,” Casey wrote. Notably, sensationalistic reports helped sink a movement to completely abolish capital punishment, which had previously been gaining steam. (One 1850 petition in favor of ending the death penalty, for instance, received over a million signatures.)

It was the coverage of the police in the press that appears to have birthed the fictional amateur detective as we know it today. Crime fiction scholar Samuel Sanders has made the case that poor perception of the police in the periodical press in the latter half of the century “led to the rise of private detectives in periodical detective fiction.” Principal among them: Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic character Sherlock Holmes, who made his debut in Strand Magazine in 1891. The introduction of the first amateur sleuths at a moment when public trust in the system was low is notable. These characters may have offered a kind of fan fiction for readers disillusioned with the system: a glimpse of alternative paths to justice.

Looking back at the earliest true crime boom is a reminder that from the start the genre has existed in this uneasy paradigm of propaganda and promise. Just as stories shed light on a justice system badly in need of reform, they also played into the fears and anger that propped up that same system of power. That the invention of the fictional crime sleuth rose out of this moment feels like one of the most hopeful takeaways for today.

Like many, I started watching Only Murders not for the murders but for the chemistry between Mabel and her fellow true-crime enthusiasts—co-conspirators Oliver Putnam (the soft-eyed, washed-up Broadway producer played by Martin Short) and Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin’s unlucky-in-love actor). But now I’m also watching to see how the show, and others like it, navigate and reckon with our true crime moment.

With one in three Americans reporting that they consume true crime content once a week, the genre isn’t in any danger of losing steam. However, more true crime programming that pushes back against its worst tropes could point a way forward and even help rehabilitate it.

Because for all the bad, this early history reminds us that true crime has the potential to serve as a vessel for change—that maybe, as the trio in Only Murders suggest, by being engaged citizens, and championing observation, communication, and critical thinking, each of us in the crowd can play a role in agitating for a better world.

The post Could True Crime Make the World a Better Place? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But how, then, does one explain the Bogles, a Texas-Tennessee clan that has been running afoul of the law across multiple generations going back to the Civil War? This one single family, Butterfield discovered, had been responsible for stealing cars and brewing moonshine, burglaries and bombings, manslaughters and murders. Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles all had taken part in the wayward family business.

And Butterfield’s research would reveal that the Bogles weren’t a statistical exception. Multiple studies have shown that only about 5 percent of all families account for fully half of all crime in the United States, and 10 percent account for two out of every three crimes committed here. Could genetics be a determining factor in why people break the law?

That troubling, counter-intuitive question runs through Butterfield’s new book, In My Father’s House: A New View of How Crime Runs in the Family. It also underscored the Zócalo/KCRW “Critical Thinking with Warren Olney” event, titled “Do Americans Misunderstand the Roots of Crime?” at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles.

In the discussion, moderated by Olney, the venerable host of KCRW’s “To the Point,” Butterfield explained how he’d stumbled onto a family whose members have spent much of their lives shuttling in and out of prisons.

The author, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered the waning years of the U.S.-Indochina war before taking up crime reporting, already had written a highly praised book about an African American family that fell into crime, All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (1995).

Butterfield had been searching for a white crime family to profile when a friend in Oregon put him in touch with the Bogles, 60 of whose members have served prison time. The patriarch, Rooster Bogle, had spread what his kinfolk called “the family curse” to his own nine offspring and two wives. He would take his kids out with him on crime sprees, from a young age. Occasionally, he would point out the local penitentiary and tell his progeny to take a good look because that’s where they, too, were going to end up later in life.

Being born a Bogle was like being served a guilty verdict in the maternity ward, being handed down a fate through your bloodlines. As one of Rooster’s sons told Butterfield, “What you’re raised with you grow to become. There’s no escape.”

Sensing the packed audience’s growing unease and astonishment at this information, Olney commented, “If you think this sounds like a series from Netflix or HBO, you’re absolutely right.”

Indeed, though the Bogles may have been uneducated and poor, their lore is rich with improbable stories and details that a novelist might shun because they strain credibility. The family forebears got their start brewing up moonshine in a Southern hamlet, then later tried to gain a federal government pension for a relative who claimed to have been a captain in the Union Army. (He wasn’t.)

From what might euphemistically be called white-collar crimes, the family graduated to more serious fare. Rooster and his siblings didn’t go to school, but they did get to meet Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd, while their parents kept food on the table by working in a traveling carnival and hawking moonshine on the side.

When Rooster turned 16 his entire family took part in a burglary at a local grocery store that netted about $20,000. Although his mother had masterminded the heist, Rooster pleaded guilty when the police came calling, sparing his mother and launching his own long career as a cellblock resident.

Asked by Olney how he’d managed to get these confessional stories, Butterfield replied that some family members had been reluctant at first, but eventually cooperated because they’d actually read Butterfield’s earlier book, and somehow reckoned that he might turn the Bogle family into celebrities if he wrote about them.

Butterfield was able to validate much of what the Bogles told him through police and court reports. He also encountered a judge in Salem, Oregon who over time had had four generations of Bogles appear before his bench. “It was a family value being passed down,” Butterfield said. “When we talk about family values being passed down, we usually mean good family values, but they can be rotten family values, too.”

The same judge told Butterfield that he’d dealt with four other families that spanned four generations of criminals. From that experience, the judge had concluded that simply locking people up doesn’t work; criminal family members needed to be separated, the judge reasoned.

But asserting that crime may be caused, even partially, by genetics, can be a controversial and, some experts would argue, a racist and discriminatory claim. Such genetically based arguments have lost favor over the decades because of their association with 19th-century junk science, and with the Nazis’ criminal experiments in the concentration camps. Civil rights and African American organizations also have strongly challenged and criticized the idea that genetics—rather than institutionalized racism and social inequality—could account for the disproportionate number of incarcerated men of color, said Butterfield, who added pointedly that white Americans still commit the majority of crimes. “People tend to forget that,” he said.

And yet the grim destiny of the Bogle family may indicate that criminal behavior can get programmed into certain groups of people. Although one Bogle female acquired religion and managed to shake free of her home, Butterfield said, “It’s not easy making it out of there. She made it out, but her younger sister didn’t.”

So what, Olney asked, is the way to solve this?

Butterfield said that we need better ways to get information about peoples’ family histories of incarceration—not in order to stigmatize the family, but so as to get them help. In the same way that doctors ask patients about their families’ medical histories of diabetes and high blood pressure, we should be asking people who commit crimes about their family’s criminal records.

One outcome of gathering such useful information is that a judge then would be able to give the family of a troubled kid the option of having what’s called a “multi-systemic therapy” team of therapists, social workers, and other medical professionals who actually move into the family home. Living at close quarters allows the team to closely observe and monitor the family, analyze how it works, and turn its younger members toward better role models. Such teams of professionals have treated thousands of families and are showing “pretty good results,” Butterfield said. But these studies still are in their infancy, he added.

Another approach is to move criminals away from the communities where their bad behavior took root. Butterfield said the power of moving was observed in the case of Louisiana state prisoners from New Orleans who relocated to Texas after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on the Crescent City in 2005. Setting down roots in a new state broke the criminals’ social networks, giving them a better shot at starting over fresh.

This is important because people who spend a lot of time in jails and prisons become institutionalized to living there. Butterfield said he has seen fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters, who share the same prison cell, an arrangement that reinforces anti-social behaviors and leaves people more dependent on their blood relatives and less able to cope when they’re released back into society.

Fielding questions from the audience, Butterfield was asked if he knew of any studies of crime rates in Australia, some of whose early immigrant population comprised inmates banished by the British to the Empire’s farthest reaches. Given that background, one might expect Oz to have high crime rates, the questioner said. Butterfield replied that he couldn’t speak specifically to Australia’s case, but said that the United States has had very high violent crime rates since the 18th century, especially homicides.

Another audience member asked how the relatively small budgets for rehabilitation contribute to recidivism among criminals, including criminal families. Butterfield agreed that prisons spend most of their funds on housing and guards, and suggested that more money could be better spent on programs like court-ordered multi-systemic family therapy.

Ultimately, nature and nurture work together and complement each other, Butterfield said, assigning some people normal lives, and others lives of violence, punishment, and isolation. “I don’t think you can separate the two,” he said.

The post Can Criminals Be Genetically Determined? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Two robbers enter the Circle T Market in Riverbank. One carries a large assault rifle, an AK-47. Upon seeing them, the clerk behind the counter puts his hands up. Yet the elderly store owner finds the weapon absurdly big and casually walks up to the robbers, laughing. His shoulders are relaxed and he points the palms of his hands up as if asking them whether they are serious. Both perpetrators are startled upon seeing the elderly man laughing at them. One runs away, while the one with the AK-47 freezes, is tackled, and is later arrested by police. They had robbed numerous stores before.

Analyzing videos captured on CCTV, mobile phones, or body cameras and uploaded to YouTube now provides first-hand insight into a variety of similar situations. And there are a lot of videos to watch. In 2013, 31 percent of internet users online posted a video to a website. And on YouTube alone, more than 300 hours of video footage are uploaded every minute. Many of these videos capture our behavior at weddings and concerts, protests and revolutions, and tsunamis and earthquakes. Taboos become obsolete as more types of events are uploaded, from birth to live-streamed murder.

While some of these developments are contentious, their scientific potential to understand how social life happens can’t be ignored. This ever-expanding cache of recordings may have drastic implications for our understanding of human behavior.

Historically, researchers have had to rely heavily on interviews, laboratory experiments, and participant observation in order to study human behavior. Each of these approaches has its strengths, but they all face fundamental challenges when applied to studying real-life actions in detail. Eyewitness testimony can be deeply flawed. Even accurate memories fade. People tend to act differently under observation by a researcher than they do in real life. These discrepancies make 21st-century video a game-changer.

Videos can provide answers to important questions. What contributes to positive conversations, successful negotiations, or the charm of a public figure? Which situational dynamics allow teams to perform well together, whether in business, sport, law enforcement, or the arts? Video is especially powerful when it captures rare events that we didn’t see before. How does a panicking crowd move? How does a revolution unfold? What do people really do during a natural disaster?

Events on video can be studied numerous times, in slow motion or even frame by frame, examining every detail relevant to the situation: verbal and non-verbal communication, a person’s movements, fields of vision, uses of space, interactions, exchanges of glances and gestures, facial expressions, and body postures. And such videos can be accessed widely through websites such as YouTube or LiveLeak that employ user-generated content, or live-streaming sites like GeoCam.

What exactly do such videos allow us to observe that we could not see before? Take retail robbery as an example.

If a masked person enters a store and points a gun at the clerk, the situation is clear—this is a robbery. Even clerks who have never been in a robbery before know the deal when someone enters the store with a gun in hand. Most clerks do fear for their lives during a robbery, and many suffer from post-traumatic stress afterward. Yet studies conducted decades ago by criminologist David Luckenbill, as well as Charles Wellford and colleagues, showed that about one-third of clerks do not comply and numerous robberies fail. How is this possible?

Today, videos show the clue to the puzzle can be found in the situational dynamic of the robbery. CCTV recordings uploaded online show us that in those incidents where the robber is able to get the money, both actors act in accordance with a robbery ritual and their respective role—that of the confident, angry, and dangerous perpetrator and of the fearful, submissive clerk.
But if one of those involved does not show the behavior associated with their role, and breaks character, the ritual collapses. It can break down due to tiny actions by the perpetrator, even moves that seem barely noticeable, such as stumbling briefly. If perpetrators are perceived as acting out of character, videos show clerks stop “believing” in them as a dangerous robber.

Moreover, they try to make sense out of the unexpected situation and pick up on unusual behavior by the perpetrator. They adapt their actions to a new role that fits the behavior and drop out of character as well. When a perpetrator seems tentative, the clerk might take the dominant role, as in a robbery in California, where a female clerk makes the indecisive robber wait—basically putting the robbery on hold—saying in an annoyed tone that she is on the phone. In a store robbery in Florida uploaded by the New York Post, the armed perpetrator’s voice indicates sadness about committing the crime. He is hardly looking his victim in the eye. As a result, the clerk is no longer behaving as a fearful robbery victim, but starts cheering him up. They talk about Jesus and discuss possible solutions to the robber’s financial problems. At the end he leaves without the money.

Across such instances, we see clerks gain confidence, and resist. This happens even when perpetrators drop their role for a split second, regardless of the gender of the clerk, experience level of the perpetrator, or whether they look physically more or less fit than the clerk. Elderly clerks laugh and tackle armed perpetrators, as in the AK-47 robbery in the Riverbank minimart, or strong-looking armed male perpetrators stumble briefly and petite female clerks confidently attack and beat them until they run away. Once the illusion is broken, perpetrators seem to comply with their new role. They could shoot at the clerk, fire a warning shot, or scream and shout. Yet they tend to freeze, engage in conversations, or run away.

Such dynamics offer scientists insights into how social routines break down. Studying social behavior caught on video that is now accessible online, we can determine how routines work in the first place, what rules they abide by, and how stable or fragile they are. These videos show that people not only rely on routines in robberies and expect robbers to behave a certain way; they also expect friends, parents, coworkers, pilots, or store clerks to play their respective roles.

Sociologists like Harold Garfinkel and Randall Collins have shown that when routines fail and people behave out of character (be it a perpetrator behaving like a child, or a parent behaving like a coworker), we tend to perceive situations as strange and interactions as disconcerting and unsatisfying. We tend to like people less with whom we cannot make a routine work—even if it is just a mundane conversation.

The use of 21st-century videos to explore these kinds of social behaviors and situational patterns is still evolving. The advancement of software programs, data mining, and automated coding of videos might soon enable social scientists to study and compare even more events.

At the same time, technological improvements also allow videos to be easily altered or fabricated. Video uploads therefore need to be checked thoroughly for credibility and authenticity. Fortunately, software for checking authenticity is also evolving rapidly.

Moreover, ethical issues and privacy concerns arise when studying videos caught on CCTV or mobile phone and uploaded online. Scholars might not be able to reach people caught on video to get their consent as research subjects. This can be problematic, especially if private, potentially incriminating, or embarrassing behavior is filmed. Does that mean we should not tap into this vast pool of newly available data? How can we develop policies that permit such research while protecting the people in the videos?

As we answer these questions, 21st-century video is likely to revolutionize research on situational dynamics and our understanding of social life.

The post Closed-Circuit TV Is Revolutionizing Our Understanding of Human Behavior appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Though Candyman is rumored to dwell inside one of the looming high-rises, what’s most terrifying here is really the idea of the inner-city location. Decades before writer-director Bernard Rose’s horror flick arrived in theaters, public housing for many Americans had come to represent the unruliness and otherness of U.S. cities. And Cabrini-Green stood as the symbol of every troubled housing project—a bogeyman that conjured fears of violence, poverty, and racial antagonism.

Like many mid-20th-century public housing projects across the Northeast and Midwest, Cabrini-Green was conceived as a model of civic redevelopment, and as a source for a more democratic form of urban living. It was built in stages on Chicago’s Near North Side beginning in the 1940s—first with barracks-style row houses and then, in the 1950s and 1960s, augmented by 23 towers on “superblocks” closed off to through streets and commercial uses. It contained 3,600 public housing units in total, with a population exceeding 15,000, packed tightly into a mere 70 acres of land.

The Cabrini-Green area, along the banks of the Chicago River’s North Fork, previously had been an industrial slum, home to a succession of poor immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Sweden, and southern Italy, in addition to a growing number of African Americans who had fled from the Jim Crow South. The smell of sulfur and the bright flames of a nearby gasworks had given the river district the nickname “Little Hell.” House fires, infant mortality, pneumonia, and juvenile delinquency all occurred there at many times the rate of the city as a whole.

Public housing was seen as a cure for the area’s decay and disrepair. At the dedication of the Cabrini row houses, in 1942, Mayor Edward Kelley declared that the modest and orderly buildings “symbolize the Chicago that is to be. We cannot continue as a nation, half slum and half palace. This project sets an example for the wide reconstruction of substandard areas which will come after the war.”

Then, as now, the for-profit real estate market had failed most low-income renters. During the 1940s, the rental vacancy rate in Chicago fell to less than one percent. A quarter of the existing homes were falling apart and needed to be replaced. In the city’s segregated black neighborhoods, families were excluded from the open housing market, and conditions there were even more dire. New public housing offered renters a kind of salvation—from cold-water flats, firetraps, and capricious evictions. For many families, the Chicago Housing Authority promise of a “decent, safe and sanitary home” felt like a leap into the middle class.

But as time went on, the Chicago Housing Authority, like many big-city authorities, was perennially underfunded and disastrously mismanaged. In Chicago, as elsewhere, high-rise developments were built intentionally in neighborhoods that were already segregated racially. After the 1950s, as large numbers of Chicagoans fled the city for the suburbs, and manufacturing jobs disappeared as well, public housing populations became poorer and more uniformly black. The amount collected in rent—as a proportion of a resident’s income—declined. Deficits ballooned; maintenance and repairs lagged.

The developments, with their isolation and high concentrations of poverty, were treated increasingly as isolated vice zones by both police and criminals. By the time of Candyman, Chicago was home not only to three of the country’s 12 richest communities but also, amazingly, to 10 of the country’s 16 poorest census tracts, all of them including large public housing complexes.

Partly because of its proximity to Chicago’s ritzy Gold Coast neighborhood, Cabrini-Green became “notorious” for crime, but this reputation was complicated. Other public housing developments in the city were larger, poorer, and had higher rates of crime. In the extreme segregation of Chicago, though, Cabrini-Green remained that uncommon frontier where whites still crossed paths with poor blacks. The complex was noted as a place to avoid, or to go to, for felonious offerings.

Cabrini-Green, therefore, entered the popular imagination as the embodiment of the “inner city,” becoming the setting of the prime-time sit-com Good Times, of movies, urban crime novels, documentaries, rap songs and endless media coverage. There was a recurring Saturday Night Live skit in the 1980s about a teenage single mother—her name was Cabrini Green Harlem Watts Jackson. The public housing project had made it onto a Mount Rushmore of scariest places in urban America.

What Candyman captures is this muddling of what is real and imaginary. Cabrini-Green was both an actual place with an array of serious problems, and a nightmare vision of fear and prejudice. A horror movie is often about what isn’t seen; it requires menacing visions to fill in the shadows of the unknown. The real Cabrini-Green had plenty of violent crime, but it was also home to thousands of families who had formed elaborate support networks and lived everyday lives. The fictional Cabrini-Green in which people believed in a murderous, hook-handed spirit was the pure creation of that fear. “The old dark house on the hill has always been the standard setting of horror,” director Rose explained. “But it seemed to me that the big public housing project was the new venue of terror.”

Rose created an elaborate backstory for his film’s killer that tapped into numerous racial tropes. In his previous life, Candyman was a gifted portrait artist, the son of a slave at the turn of the 19th century whose father earned a fortune after the Civil War by inventing a means to mass-produce shoes. Candyman fell in love with and impregnated one of his subjects, a white woman, and the girl’s father hired thugs to lynch him, chasing him to the site of the future Cabrini-Green, sawing off his painting hand before setting him on fire. In his reincarnated form, Candyman (Tony Todd) appears in the movie gaunt-cheeked, towering in a fur-lined trench coat, possibly as hell-bent on miscegenation—Virginia Madsen’s Helen is a dead ringer for his postbellum beloved—as on murder.

“Just as urban legends are based on the real fears of those who believe in them, so are certain urban locations able to embody fear,” Chicago film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his three-out-of-four-star review of the movie in the fall of 1992.

Poster for the 1992 horror film Candyman. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Candyman arrived in theaters as the very meaning of “inner city” was already changing again, a signifier not only of danger but of wealth and a mounting wave of gentrification. At the beginning of the 1990s, Chicago’s population ticked up for the first time in 40 years. The area around Cabrini-Green was booming with new development and an influx of young white professionals. It’s at this moment that the ghetto actually became scarier. The era’s yuppies inhabited “transitioning” neighborhoods, and reports of crime were being imagined as near-misses—just a wrong turn away. You can see these anxieties in the alarm bells then sounding over the coming tides of “crack babies,” “wilding” teens, and “super-predators” (as well as in other similar films of the era such as After Hours and Judgment Night).

In one scene in Candyman, Helen reads about a real-life crime that occurred in Chicago public housing: A man was able to enter neighboring apartment units through connected bathroom vanities so cheaply constructed that he simply pushed in the mirrors to create a passageway. Returning home, she discovers that in her own high-end condominium bathroom the same is true. Helen learns that her building was originally part of Cabrini-Green. It’s a preposterous plot turn that feels true to the moral panic of the moment. In only a matter of time, Candyman himself invades her apartment.

In the years since Candyman came out, more than 250,000 units of public housing have been demolished across the United States. The last Cabrini-Green tower—and the final public housing high-rise in Chicago not reserved for the elderly—came down in 2011. The clearing of these high-rises was touted as an effort to revive the city and to rescue the families who had been trapped in the generational poverty of public housing. Mayor Richard M. Daley promised that former residents would now be able to share in the benefits of the resurgent city. “I want to rebuild their souls,” he declared.

Less looming mixed-income developments—blending market-rate and heavily subsidized households—replaced many of the same public housing buildings that were used to clear the slums of a half-century before, but by design, only a small number of the old tenants were able to move into the new buildings. With Section 8 housing vouchers, most former residents (along with their souls) ended up renting private housing in predominantly black and under-resourced sections of Chicago’s South and West sides. The demolitions didn’t do away with the poverty and isolation that afflicted the city’s public housing; these problems were moved elsewhere, becoming less visible and no longer literally owned by the state.

Today, only one in five U.S. families that are poor enough to qualify for a subsidy receive any sort of government support as city rents rise while wages for all but the highest earners stagnate. Half of all renters now pay more than 30 percent of their income for rent; a quarter pay more than 50 percent. Fewer and fewer people can afford to live close to the economic activity of the inner city. For the first time, the United States has a greater number of poor people living in suburbs than in cities.

At the end of Candyman, the residents of Cabrini-Green gather together outside their high-rises and light an immense bonfire. It’s a purge that exorcises the phantasm as well as the horrors of public housing. In 2014, twenty-two years after the film’s release, the Chicago Housing Authority opened up a lottery for people to get onto the waiting list for either a public housing unit or a voucher. Despite the stigma of dysfunction, danger, and dilapidation, one in four of Chicago’s million households entered the lottery for a Chicago Housing Authority home. The real horror of people going without adequate housing remains.

“Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman….”

The post The 1992 Horror Film That Made a Monster Out of a Chicago Housing Project appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yet this country has homegrown examples of effective gun regulation. Hawai‘i is one.

Although it’s best known for tropical weather and natural beauty, the Aloha State has another quality that distinguishes it from other states: the lowest rates of gun violence in America. In 2015, Hawai‘i had a mere 2.6 gun deaths per 100,000 residents, compared to 11.8 nationally and an astonishing rate of 19.2 in Alaska. Even Hawai‘i’s urban areas are relatively free of gun violence. Honolulu, the capital of Hawai‘i, has the lowest violent crime rate of any city in America. Its homicide rate is similar to the Dallas suburb of Plano, Texas, which is among the country’s most affluent communities.

What is Hawai‘i doing right—and can it be a model for the nation?

The islands’ low unemployment and a local culture that takes living with aloha seriously certainly contribute to the state’s low rates of gun crime. But Hawai‘i is far from being a crime-free paradise. Property crime is relatively high in Honolulu, and the city has about the same number of car thefts per capita as Los Angeles. In other words, there is crime in Hawai‘i, just not much gun-related crime. And this suggests that Hawai‘i’s strict gun laws—rather than its prosperity or unique local culture—are responsible.

Hawai‘i is the only state that requires all firearms to be registered—both rifles and handguns. All police departments are required to run background checks on anyone trying to purchase a gun. The law does not limit the number of guns that may be purchased at one time, but it does require all purchasers of firearms to register for a license. Buyers with a history of mental illness, drug or domestic violence convictions, certain sexual offenders, and anyone with a restraining order are disqualified.

Put this all together, and Hawai‘i is the state with the seventh-strongest gun laws, according to grades from The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. In 2017 Guns & Ammo magazine ranked it as the 47th-worst state for gun owners, in part because it has a de facto ban on concealed carry weapons permits. The result of these regulations is that, by most measures, Hawai‘i has one of the lowest gun ownership rates in the nation. One recent study estimates that about one-quarter of households own guns, compared to a national average of 57 percent and a high of nearly 77 percent in Mississippi.

The scholarly research on firearm policy is complex, but most studies support one conclusion: states with more guns have more gun-related deaths and violence. It is no coincidence that Alaska, which has the highest rate of gun fatalities in the United States, also has one of the highest rates of gun ownership.

And America has lots of guns—nearly one for every man, woman, and child. Mass shootings receive the most media attention, but every year thousands of people fall victim to gun-related violence. According to the Human Development Index, the United States has nearly 30 gun homicides per million people, compared to 5.1 in Canada and just 1.4 in Australia. More guns are associated with higher suicide rates and violence against police, too. Simply having a gun in the house increases the risk that a family member will take his or her own life. Hawai‘i’s low rates of gun ownership almost certainly contribute to the fact that it has the third-lowest suicide rate for men.

Hawai‘i’s experience isn’t the only evidence that comprehensive gun laws make a difference. One major article in Epidemiologic Reviews reviewed 130 studies from 10 different countries and determined that restrictive laws were associated with fewer gun-related homicides and suicides. But looking to other nations for our inspiration is not always a useful exercise. America has a long tradition of gun ownership, and the Second Amendment makes it impossible to enact regulations like those in Japan or the United Kingdom.

Which is why Americans might think more about Hawai‘i. Over the past decade, as other states have made it easier to purchase or carry firearms, Hawai‘i has doubled down on its restrictions. Recent laws prohibit the possession of so-called “bump fire stocks” and require people with significant behavioral or mental disorders to surrender their firearms and ammunition to police. Hawai‘i was also the first state to cooperate with the FBI’s new “Rap Back” system that will notify local police whenever a gun owner has registered anywhere in the United States.

Hawai‘i’s relative isolation suggests just how well strict regulations can work. In many cities and states, it is easy to subvert the law by driving across state lines. This can make it difficult to gauge the effectiveness of gun laws. But Hawai‘i’s unique geography make this impossible: All guns must be transported on a plane or arrive in a regulated cargo shipment.

Hawai‘i’s experience suggests that common sense gun regulations, when they cannot easily be subverted, save lives. These laws work even in a place that struggles with other, less serious forms of crime. It is time for Congress to pass national laws that follow Hawai‘i’s lead.

The post Why Hawai‘i Has America’s Lowest Rates of Gun Violence appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The short answer—offered at the debut of a Zócalo/KCRW event series, “Critical Thinking with Warren Olney”—amounted to this: America was founded by traitors.

“The American Revolution was a massive act of treason against the British government,” said UC Davis legal scholar Carlton F.W. Larson, who is working on a book about treason. And even before the war, American colonists had been accused of treason under English law for acts of protest like the Boston Tea Party.

So, Larson said, the Founders pointedly included a limited definition of treason in the U.S. constitution. The more expansive version in English law made it easier to punish those who opposed the King as traitors—with not just execution but decapitation and disembowelment. The Founders had another reason for making treason hard to charge and prove: to discourage political opponents from accusing one another of treason and being un-American.

“What the framers did not want was to have a democracy where the winning side prosecutes the losing side for treason,” Larson said, a sentiment that echoes in today’s bitterly partisan American politics.

Larson explained the history in response to questions from Olney, the legendary public radio host and dean of Southern California journalists, during the event at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Los Angeles. Larson and his fellow panelists, all lawyers and scholars, emphasized that treason is the only crime defined in the U.S. constitution: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” It is also the only crime with a standard of evidence: “No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open Court.”

UCLA legal scholar Eugene Volokh said those requirements—treason must occur in the context of war, and there must be two witnesses—severely limit prosecution for treason. When Americans commit crimes that are popularly characterized as treason, they are usually charged with other crimes. Even assisting countries like Russia and China, with whom the U.S. is often in conflict, isn’t treason because we’re not currently at war.

“There is a vast range of bad behavior, including bad behavior having to do with other countries,” he said, “a tiny fraction of which is treason.”

Another panelist, senior lecturer at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs Asha Rangappa, had firsthand dealings with what might be called treason in her previous job as an FBI special agent. She worked to identify those engaged in intelligence for foreign governments, and then flipped them to help the U.S. “They are essentially betraying their country for the United States,” she noted. “This is the spy game. We do it. Other countries do it.”

But American double agents do not necessarily commit treason under the Constitution, she said, given the requirements of war and witnesses. The notorious Robert Hanssen, a former FBI special agent who provided information to the Soviet and Russian governments for two decades, wasn’t convicted of treason, but of espionage.

“There are very few laws against spying,” said Rangappa.

Rangappa suggested using alternative words to convey betraying the country—her preference is “treachery.” In the Inferno, Dante reserved the ninth circle of hell for treachery. “He made it the lowest, blackest, and furthest from heaven,” she recalled. “When I talk about Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning,” both of whom she said she considered traitors, their behavior “may not be the legal definition of treason,” but it is “treacherous.”

Snowden and Manning are part of a long line of American figures who are perceived at least by some as traitors. The panelists mentioned Benedict Arnold (who “remains the greatest traitor America ever had,” said Larson); Robert E. Lee (Volokh saw him as a traitor but noted that the Civil War shows the wisdom of having a pardon power to promote national reconciliation); and John Walker Lindh, who aided the Taliban (he pleaded guilty to charges lesser than treason).

The panelists also argued in complicated detail over Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric who became an Al Qaeda propagandist and was killed by a U.S. drone on orders of President Obama. Intriguingly, panelists said that al-Awlaki’s online recruitment videos would not meet the Constitution’s requirement of two witnesses. However, Larson allowed that if the Founders had anticipated video technology, they might have included such a video declaration as a standard for proving treason.

During the question-and-answer session, audience members pressed the panelists to comment on the ongoing investigations surrounding Russia, the 2016 elections, and President Trump and his associates. One audience member asked: “Could you explain what might happen when we have the results of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation?”

“Many things,” said Volokh, “but not a treason prosecution.”

Rangappa praised Mueller, her former boss when he served as FBI director, but said that people expecting his investigation to put people in prison may be disappointed. Even if he uncovers bad behavior, it could be difficult to prove federal crimes. At another point in the evening, she noted that providing information to Russians on how to use Facebook to target certain voters is not a crime, and definitely not treason.

She added that it’s important not to equate what’s legal with what’s right. She recalled doing FBI background checks of government appointees, and asking questions about people’s loyalties, bias, personal finances, or use of alcohol and drugs. The point of such checks isn’t to identify crimes so much as it is to identify people who should not be in positions of public trust.

“There’s a bigger picture we lose sight of when we just focus on legality and criminality,” she said.

The post It’s Hard to Be an American Traitor, Even If You Try appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But what happens when software is responsible for a wrongful arrest or detention?

On Aug. 1, 2016, Alameda County, California, replaced its ’70s-era case management system with new software, Tyler Technologies’ Odyssey Case Manager. This wasn’t a radical decision: Most counties around the country use some kind of software to process information about the people in their courts. When a judge issues or recalls an arrest warrant, when a defendant posts bail—all of this is data that the courts and the police rely upon to make decisions about whom to detain, arrest, or release.

But since the software was rolled out in this Northern California county, the public defender’s office has learned of dozens of cases in which people have been wrongfully arrested, detained in jail when they should have been released, or erroneously told to register as sex offenders. For example, in September four police officers showed up at the home of a 24-year-old man in Fremont to arrest him. An arrest warrant had previously been issued for his failure to appear in court on a drug possession charge but it had been dismissed. Yet the warrant mistakenly remained active in the court’s new Odyssey system, so the man was arrested. There have been so many reported errors—on a “semi-daily basis,” according to the East Bay Times—that the Office of the Alameda County Public Defender has filed hundreds of identical motions asking the court to keep accurate records. Similar problems have been reported in some of the other 25 counties in the state with Odyssey contracts, prompting the creation of a “California Tyler User Group” for court staff. Alameda County itself has decided not to use Odyssey for its family, probate, or civil matters.

No one seems to yet understand the source of the errors behind Odyssey’s case management software. For the moment, many of the mistakes appear to result from a user interface for court employees that is far more complicated than the previous system. The software manufacturer, Tyler Technologies, has had little comment. Yet this 2016 problem reflects concerns by the Supreme Court from more than 20 years ago.

In 1991, a police officer arrested Issac Evans after an identification check during a traffic stop turned up an outstanding arrest warrant. The arrest allowed the officer to search Evans’ car, which turned up a bag of marijuana and a subsequent drug possession charge.

But the outstanding arrest warrant wasn’t valid—it had already been rescinded by the judge who originally issued it for several traffic violations. In such cases, the court clerk was supposed to have called the sheriff’s clerk, who would then remove the active warrant from the sheriff’s computer database. Had the procedure been followed in Evans’ case, it’s quite likely the marijuana would not have been found because no warrant would have justified his arrest.

Because his arrest was based on an invalid warrant, Evans’ Fourth Amendment rights had been violated. Normally, this would mean that the marijuana found as a result of the search would have been suppressed, under the exclusionary rule, which is intended to deter police misconduct. One exception to that rule, however, occurs when the police act in “good faith” on a legal decision that they believe to be correct, even if it later turns out to be wrong. In 1994, the Supreme Court decided in Arizona v. Evans that this exception applied to Evans’ case: The mistake was the fault of the court clerk, not of the arresting officer, who relied in good faith based on the invalid warrant.

Issac Evans lost because the Supreme Court was convinced that he fell victim to an isolated error. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, for example, suggested that the court might reach a different conclusion in a case where “the recordkeeping system itself” contained “no mechanism to ensure its accuracy over time” and “routinely” resulted in false arrests. Likewise, Justice David Souter stated that if a computer database had no way of “keeping the number of resulting false arrests within an acceptable minimum limit,” the exclusionary rule might apply. The software mistakes occurring in Alameda County appear to be more systematic than isolated.

So how do individual criminal defendants identify and challenge the “fruits of computerized error,” as Souter called them in Arizona v. Evans?

The answer is that we don’t have a very good answer. At some point in the future, the Supreme Court may decide to apply the exclusionary rule in a case where systemic software errors violate Fourth Amendment rights. The Alameda County Superior Court will hear the public defender office’s request to intervene in the software errors in January. In the meantime, software problems like those experienced in Alameda County have tangible, real-life consequences. Moreover, not every defendant who has fallen victim to these problems may discover that their issue is the result of a systemic software problem rather than an isolated bookkeeping snafu.

These problems will likely worsen as software increasingly becomes embedded in everything we do. Odyssey clearly has its flaws, but at least court employees can identify a problem like a recalled arrest warrant, even if it’s too late to stop a wrongful arrest. With other types of software, however, errors may be difficult to detect. Algorithms designed to help judges decide bail, or to help the police identify suspicious behavior, may be hard for nonexperts to understand, let alone critique. The private companies that design and sell these products may also be reluctant to share their proprietary information.

Part of the problem is a bad fit. Criminal cases are individual, but in the age of big data, problems and solutions have to be systematic. When there are few incentives to audit databases or check for software errors, mistaken arrests and detentions should be no surprise. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once stated that “electronic databases form the nervous system of contemporary criminal justice operations.” Today software, and increasingly sophisticated software, is part of that nervous system. Yet we fail to ensure the system’s health.

The post In California, Big Data Is Getting the Wrong People Arrested appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 2012, we joined with the Rialto Police Department in conducting the world’s first randomised experiment of the effect of body cameras on relations between police and the public. This experiment came about through the foresight of then-police chief Tony Farrar, with whom we—two academics with expertise in criminal justice—co-authored the research. The original project began as a way of cutting red tape, but ended up influencing policing and criminal justice systems around the world, with far-reaching implications.

At the time of the experiment, the Rialto Police Department handled 3,000 property and 500 violent crimes per year, as well as six to seven homicides annually (nearly 50 percent higher than the U.S. national rate per 100,000).

The study randomly assigned whole shifts of officers to wear cameras or not. Each week, all shifts were assigned to treatment (wear cameras) or control (don’t wear cameras). On a treatment shift, all officers had to wear cameras, had to keep the cameras turned on for their whole shift, and had to give verbal warnings to anyone they encountered that they were wearing a camera. The study then compared those shifts where cameras were being used to those where they weren’t (Figure 1).

 
The results were surprising—because they were so clear. When officers were wearing cameras on shifts, police use of force against suspects was 50 percent lower. Similarly, complaints against the police fell to almost zero in the 12 months after the cameras were introduced. Therefore, the cameras caused both use of force and complaints to fall.

Police use of force and the complaints it engenders are expensive for police departments. They cost the trust and cooperation of communities—as we’ve seen with recent tragic and horrific incidents around the country. They’re also financially expensive: A single complaint against a police force can wind up costing upwards of a million dollars in compensation. For a small force like Rialto, that can wipe out the annual budget.

In the wake of the killings by police officers of Eric Garner in New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, President Obama allocated more than $260 million in federal funds to cover as much as half the cost of 50,000 police body cameras, as well as training in their use and community outreach. That amount was also likely matched or surpassed by the amount of money that police forces were already committed to spending on body-worn cameras.

But how do we know that the Rialto results there were not just a one-off? Does success in Rialto predict success in places like Houston and Baton Rouge, where we’ve seen police come under public scrutiny for excessive use of force?

Recently we ran a series of new experiments with 10 police forces across the U.S. and U.K., with more underway. The results from these studies (here and here), generally confirm the Rialto Police Department experiment findings. But there are two crucial caveats: it cannot be left to the officers to determine the shifts during which they will wear the cameras, and the cameras must stay turned on for the entire shift.

As soon as officers are given the powers to decide which cases should be recorded, or at which point during the interaction with the citizen to turn the camera on, body-worn cameras not only can fail, but may backfire. We found that on the one hand, when officers used their discretion to turn cameras on and off during their shifts this was associated with an increased use of force. On the other hand, when officers followed protocol and kept cameras on during shifts, this led to lower use of force.

What we take from this is that when making the decision to invest in body cameras, police departments need to be thinking hard about how they want them used—we think the evidence is good enough to say that cameras should be on before officers are engaged with suspects and (ideally) kept on throughout their whole shift.

And this isn’t just about use of force, but also their role in evidence, police-community interactions and for police accountability. The Rialto Police Department, like many other law enforcement agencies, began using an online system operated by Taser called Evidence.com to streamline tracking of evidence and delivery of cases to the district attorney’s office. This is part of a wider movement of digitization in policing, and Rialto was one of its leaders. Having all the interactions recorded, available for audit if necessary, and electronically coded, added to the overall design of the experiment. We anticipate that this will soon be standard procedure for policing.

If being observed by a body camera leads to greater professionalism, accountability, and a more consensual style of policing, officers may not resort to unnecessary or excessive force. At the same time—and as important—citizens who are videotaped while talking to cops may exercise more self-control and take part in a respectful dialogue with officers of the law, even if they are suspected of breaking the law. The camera keeps both the officer and the citizen in check by reminding them they are being watched.

Body-worn cameras alone cannot solve the problems with policing in America today. But used properly they can help address the mistrust that has grown between some communities and their police.

The post How Body Cameras Curbed Police Use of Force in Rialto appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the early 1990s, my mom, my two older brothers and I moved from South Los Angeles to Rialto in San Bernardino County. During that decade the black population in the Inland Empire increased significantly and many were like us—families in search of jobs and housing away from crime and overcrowding in Los Angeles.

My mom was a nurse and she worked long hours on the swing shift to provide for my brothers and me. I was in the “gifted and talented” program, and I was the queen of softball. But emotionally, I was a mess. When I was 14, I got caught shoplifting and spent three months in juvenile hall, after which I was put on house arrest. Here I was in ninth grade going to school with an ankle bracelet. I was ostracized, bullied, and teased daily. I ditched school to escape, violating my parole.

So it was back to juvenile hall for another six months, after which they wouldn’t let me come home—I was made a ward of the court. Shoplifting was my only crime but I paid dearly for it. My probation officer wanted to send me to the California Youth Authority. To me, that meant I’d get beat up and tortured and possibly killed.

But the judge didn’t look at me as “shoplifter and troublemaker” and, thankfully for me he was compassionate and sent me to a boarding school in Colorado. At boarding school there were mentors who told me that I could change my situation. “You don’t have to be this,” they said. They poured that message and that support into me and they stuck with me. I did well in my classes, excelled in sports, and I even got my first job. I promised myself that one day I would do that for someone else: I would be one of those mentors.

I returned to San Bernardino and spent a number of years climbing the corporate ladder, ultimately securing a well-paying career at a Fortune 500 media company. My salary covered a good home for my two kids and me, a nice car, vacations, and everything we needed to live comfortably.

But I wasn’t comfortable. Inside, I was struggling with the culture—everything from office politics to perceptions about my hair, which I could not wear “naturally” because the clients would not accept it. I felt like it was just me, on an island, by myself.

In 2014, I quit. I re-connected with some childhood friends and we decided we needed to do something for our community. Around this time Trayvon Martin was in the daily news and so was the violence in San Bernardino. With the support of my friends, we officially launched United Nations of Consciousness, a nonprofit dedicated to unifying and empowering people of African descent. Our first official event was a community town hall forum called “S.O.S: State of San Bernardino, Stop the Violence.”

 
Our motto at UNC is “resources, reach, and results.” A big part of our mission is to bring together all of the many resources in the African American community—including individuals and businesses as well as political and religious organizations. Our core values are rooted in self-sufficiency, economic growth, and development.

After the town hall we began leading weekly clean-ups in our parks and neighborhoods. We held resource fairs with a health clinic on-site, GED sign-ups, and workshops on how to expunge your criminal record. Now, we are doing a lot of work with youth.

We decided to do something about the problem of summer. For some families summer vacation means months of fun in the sun. But for working families that are just getting by it’s a nightmare. How are they going to pay for childcare? Sometimes they’re forced just to leave the kids home alone all day. This summer we held our first summer session for kids, an all-day program for six weeks with workshops and enrichment.

For the summer session we had a partnership with the San Bernardino School District that was supplemented with private donations to ensure our programs were accessible to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. The session was a six-week, all-day program, including breakfast and lunch. The total cost to San Bernardino families was a $25 registration fee.

We’re also trying to expand our kids’ horizons. Last summer I learned of a program at Cal State San Bernardino called Kids that Code. It was a week-long, immersive boot camp. It was a huge success and incredibly popular. I enrolled my son and he loved it. The fee was $450 per child for the week. This summer UNC replicated that program. We raised the funds and found the instructors to donate their time. The fee per child was just $35, and we were at capacity, with 75 kids enrolled.

Even while we keep the costs down we keep the quality up. Our staff, our instructors, our visiting speakers are all the cream of the crop. We have regular West African drum and dance classes, open to the entire community, led by Makeda Kumasi, who teaches at UC Riverside.

We teach a Rites of Passage program for boys age 10 to 14, and a parallel Discovering the New Me program for girls, covering everything from life skills, bullying, and character-building to college readiness and finance to grooming and sexuality. Dr. Lawson Nana Kweku Bush V, chair of Pan-African Studies at Cal State LA works with our youth on how to contribute to the community while remaining safe. I have a 12-year-old son and like many in my community I’ve had “the conversation” with him, about how to talk to police—how to interact—to avoid becoming a target. For the girls, we talk about self-esteem. We bring in Tamara Ellison, a youth director at her church, a life coach, and a motivational speaker who grew up in San Bernardino.

In our summer program we had youth who were struggling with some serious issues and had very little, if any support. We tried our best to help them, but it became very clear to us that we need to develop a strategy and resources to provide mental health services and emotional support to really help our youth become successful. Just during the summer program, I had to call Child Protective Services twice in the first two weeks. It was heartbreaking, but at the same time motivating for us to do more. We realized that a lot of the challenges youth are facing are the result of trauma. It is necessary for them to have emotional healing, just like I needed, to even begin to address their academic needs.

 
Here in San Bernardino there is an extreme need and the children and community are crying out for change. I believe we do have the resources to help our children, we just need to make the commitment, to come together and focus on helping our community.

You know those kids who give you the most trouble? That was me—I was one of them. Don’t put them in jail. Punishment does not rehabilitate youth. Give them leadership roles and opportunities to pursue their passions. That’s what we need as a society. If they are able to realize their potential in a positive way, they will become the leaders who can change the world. We need people who don’t march to the status quo, we need game changers and we need to put in the work—and take the risks—to help them.

The post I Escaped San Bernardino’s School to Prison Pipeline appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The last question is one that tends to engage the media, and bleed into the minds of the public.

Motive (from the Latin word motivum, meaning “moving cause”) is what moves a person to commit a certain act. In U.S. criminal law, there is no requirement to prove motive to reach a verdict. However, motive may be shown by the prosecution in order to prove that a defendant had a plausible reason to commit the crime. A defendant’s motive may be either rational (i.e., understandable to the average person) or irrational (i.e., it may be caused by mental illness).

The question of motive can be hard to answer—unless one devotes substantial time and effort, using the correct approach and the right expertise. A model example of this is the A&E investigative documentary Columbine—Understanding Why. At the request of the Littleton, Colorado D.A.’s office, forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz and colleagues performed a thorough “psychiatric autopsy” of the two teens responsible for the 1999 tragedy at Columbine High School. Through several interviews and painstaking data gathering, Dietz was able to conclude that the two shooters had multiple motives—power, respect, control, and revenge. Dietz noted that the perpetrators also “did it to gain infamy” and to leave a legacy in order to inspire others.

Common rational motives for criminal acts include greed, anger, jealousy, and the other ignoble human motivations. In contrast, an irrational motive typically involves symptoms of psychosis, such as a paranoid delusion that someone is trying kill you. When you believe your situation amounts to “kill or be killed,” you may lash out to stop your misperceived persecutor. But note that this example nevertheless represents a motive—albeit one that might be described as “rationality within irrationality.” While it flows from a psychotic delusion, there is, in fact, a logic to the motive of the actor.

While motive can depend upon a seemingly endless combination of bio-psycho-social factors, even in the most heinous and difficult to fathom crimes, there is motive. The popular myth that the perpetrator of a mass shooting “just snapped” has been debunked.

Prior to Charles Whitman’s 1966 mass shooting from atop the University of Texas tower, many cases of mass murder involved a depressed and angry man who killed his family and then himself. Such cases did not capture much media attention. Why? They were regarded as “family business” and were “too close for comfort,” according to Park Dietz. In contrast, mass shootings beginning in the 1990s have been covered intensely by the media and appear to be a different type of violence, at least in the eyes of the public. Compared to depressed and despairing familicide-suicides, these “modern” cases are likely distant enough from the average person’s experience to capture the public’s attention with morbid fascination over prolonged periods of time.

The news media often heavily influences public perception of mass murders, offering simplified explanations that assume the perpetrator is either “mad” or “bad.” Such simplistic explanations are easier for the media to report and for the public to accept. Psychiatric illness, while present in some mass murderers and mass shooters, is far from the most significant or consistent finding when individual cases are analyzed in great detail. No research has reliably established that most mass murderers and shooters are psychotic or suffering from a serious mental illness. However, many have been found to have been preoccupied with feelings of social persecution and fantasies of revenge for some type of perceived injustice. Studies of mass murderers have found that it is not uncommon for them to leave some type of final communication. Indeed, the study of mass murderers’ final communications has led to a greater understanding of their psychology and motivations.

From a public health perspective, a better understanding of mass murderers’ motives is the only rational way to prevent these tragedies and to dispel harmful myths that could lead to ill-informed crackdowns on those suffering from mental illness. This is not only an ineffective way of solving the problem, it is quite misguided. Only a small fraction of persons with serious mental illness are violent. Even if we were to assume a causal association between serious mental illness and violent crime, the overall contribution of this population to violent crimes in society is only about 3 to 5 percent. Thus, focusing broadly on persons with mental illness as a “risky” population is similar to what we observed after September 11, when anyone of Middle Eastern ancestry was viewed with heightened suspicion. But, concluding that a mass murderer’s motives are “senseless” and therefore unworthy of study is also too broad a determination, one that risks preventing future tragedies.

Comparatively, little study has focused on sociocultural motives. Sociocultural factors may provide critical data for prevention efforts that extend beyond individual factors such as mental illness or efforts to “profile” offenders. The investigation of social and cultural factors seems reasonable, if not obvious, when attention is paid to the words perpetrators leave behind. For example, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter posted online in late 2011: “[You know what I hate] … Culture. I’ve been pissed out of my mind all night thinking about it.” Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista, California, shooter, posted a manuscript online in 2014 stating, “Humanity is a cruel and brutal species.”

P.E. Mullen keenly observed that perpetrators of mass shootings acknowledged being influenced by previous mass murderers who received significant media exposure, which may be one important factor contributing to the breeding of these tragic events in Western society. Extensive and sensationalistic media attention beginning in the 1990s may have further perpetuated what Mullen describes as a “script,” resulting in a perverse glamorization of the act, particularly in the eyes of subsequent perpetrators. The study of individual cases of mass shootings that have occurred since the ‘90s suggest that perpetrators often felt socially rejected and perceived society as continually denouncing them as unnecessary, ineffectual, and pathetic. Instead of bearing the burden of perceived humiliation, they plan a surprise attack to prove their hidden “value.”

By becoming a lone protestor against an “unjust” reality, the perpetrator creates and assumes a victim role in which he can win—even by losing. Western society in particular has had a long-standing fascination with the tragic anti-hero or outlaw, the Bonnies and Clydes of American history. Their short, violent lives have become the stuff of legend. The very public and dramatic nature of mass murder seems to speak to a need for wide recognition. For the perpetrator, such a tragic revenge establishes a connection with spectators who will not soon forget what they have seen. Thus, a further extension of Mullen’s western cultural script may be characterized as the Script of the Tragic Anti-Hero, which details motive in the following “acts:”

1. The perception of a ruined social identity
2. The experience of persecution and social alienation
3. The formulation of plans to reclaim the identity via tragic revenge
4. The need for the tragic revenge to be dramatic in nature
5. The public enactment of tragic revenge
6. The aftermath of media coverage and propagation

Rodger’s final written communication appears to follow this script precisely. His communications reflect a pattern of alienation and malignant envy, culminating in a violent bid for fame and validation: “Humanity has rejected me … Exacting my retribution is my way of proving my true worth to the world.”

As supremely selfish and unacceptable as this is, it represents motive laid bare.

The post With Mass Murderers the Tragedy May Be Heinous, But It’s Rarely Senseless appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.