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I've been on a True Crime
spreehabit over the past few weeks. This happens every year or so. This year, among other material, I listened to the audiobook Hunt For The Green River Killer about the initial investigation into Gary Ridgway (I do recommend this book). Additionally, earlier this week, I watched American Nightmare on Netflix about the so-called "Gone Girl" case in Vallejo, California. Netflix streteches out what should be a 90 min doc into 3 almost hour long episodes. The directors also shoehorn in a MeToo theme towards the end and, with some selective editing, make a single female police look like the only pure police hero. They are swimming as hard as they can against the riptide of a poor business model.In Hunt For the Green River Killer, you see just how complex a "Task Force" investigation at scale is. The various intertwined jurisdictions in and around Seattle threw everything they had at trying to catch (then unknown) Ridgway in the 1980s. The result was so many possible leads and suspects that they drowned in their own noise. At one point, the lab work backlog was over 50 years. At other points, they had at lest two suspects that, at the time, looked almost like sure things. The authors do a good job of then demonstrating how obvious it was that those suspects were in no way sure things. This shows the level of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning that can crop up in these kind of investigations even in otherwise experienced and talented cops.
The Ridgway people even brought in the legendary FBI behavior psych unit (of "Mindhunter" fame). Their composite profile of the killer was along the lines of "white male between 30-50, does a manual labor type job, drinks beer, smokes, may have prior military service or outdoors interests." Again, the authors point out that that profile narrows it down to .... 40% of all men living in Seattle! Interesting and also infuriating to see how far people can build a career off of what amounts to a Forer statement.
As a fun side note: Even back in the 1980s, you had pro-sexworker women's groups who demanded the police "do more!" with the investigation, complete with statements like "if this had happened to a bunch of high school cheerleaders and not prostitutes, we would already have an arrest!" It's turtles all the way down, and Witches v. Patriarchy all the way back up, I guess.
With American Nightmare, due to its recenecy, I won't give out any spoilers. Suffice it to say that the police actually try to employ Occam's Razor and go with a basic explanation first but reality intervenes and a fairly wild story unfolds instead. The initial investigating cops don't come out looking good - although I feel like the Netflix editing team was responsible for thumbing the scales hard in this case.
The question I find myself asking in regards to both is; just how well equipped is American law enforcement (outside of the FBI) for complex investigations without a pretty obvious narrative with a lot of obvious circumstantial pointers? An example of what I mean here is; when a drug murder happens, any decent police in the area will know "this was a drug murder. the victim was a known dealer." A slightly above average police probably has some awareness of the recent conflicts between the locals gangs and can therefore say, at least, "It was probably this crew that knocked this guy off, now I just have to try to figure out who exactly did it."
With the "whodunnits" of serial killer victims and frankly just bizarre circumstances of cases like that of American Nightmare, do cops have a playbook / infrastructure / support to actually perform a full investigation effectively? The simple narrative (which Netflix eagerly jumps to without second thought) is that "Cops are often stupid / lazy / racist / sexist / corrupt and so they don't solve cases." I don't buy this for a whole host of reasons. You can debtate me on that, but I'd prefer we stay focused on the question of "are police departments setup to handle complex investigations?" The Ridgway investigation is particularly illuminating, I think; a bunch of well intentioned and talented cops eventually buried themselves in a volume of work that was utterly unmanagable. They really did pull out all of the stops and, in so doing, pretty much led themselves back to square one where their only hope was catching Ridgway in the act. (What ended up actually leading to the arrest was a 20 year wait and the advent of DNA technology, which is just as much of a magical solution)
The higher level of analysis, however, is; should police departments be setup for this? I'd actually argue they should not. Complex investigations are rare. American Nightmare gets a netflix special and Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, and Jeffrey Dahmer get hundreds of books, documentaries, and podcast about them because they are so rare and bizarre. The "murders that matter" to use a slightly indelicate phrase are those that are part of a larger anti-social pattern; drugs, gang violence, preventable domestic violence, etc. I'd much rather have a PD that is doing the leg work day in and day out to know about the goings on in bad neigborhoods so that once a murder does occur, they can jail the offender swiftly and, hopefully, interrupt a retaliatory cycle.
I have only the deepest sympathy for the victims of the "one in a million" crimes of serial killers etc. But I must admit that, at a societal level, these aren't things we can really systemically remedy (same goes for a lot of the more sensational gun violence incidients. See: Las Vegas). What we can do at a systemic level is police and enforce known areas of persistent anti-social behavior aggressively.
So, again, two primary lines of questioning:
I don't know much about this case but I assume the FBI had nothing else tangible to evaluate besides the bodies that were found?
They didn't even worry about the bodies.
The FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit reviews the case files to establish patterns and idiosyncrasies in the the actions carried out. They do victim profiling, some demographic analysis, and comparisons with other, similar crimes. Their output product is a "psychological profile" of a suspect.
This is compelling because it plays to the trope of "getting inside the mind of a killer" and because it's more or less the backbone for a lot of serial killer related fiction (the Hannibal Lecter canon is a prime example).
The downside is that it might all kind of be bullshit. As my first post outlined, a lot of the time, the profile feels specific because it's long and includes interesting details. If you zoom out a little, however, your realize that the profiles are actually incredibly broad and mostly representative of the demographics of the locality.
Here's a fun example:
"He's probably young. 20-30 at the most. Takes physical fitness very seriously and is also generally highly disciplined. He has a set daily routine and trains with weapons multiple times per week. While able to control himself at work, he'll sometimes let loose on the weekends and drink heavily and/or engage in other risky activities. He can function in a group but is mostly a loner."
Great! But the body was found near a military base. You have just described 80% of the males on the military base. You are not helping.
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The vast majority of homicides are straightforward to solve: the motive, the weapon or even the perp himself are obvious or at least limited to a manageable subset of all possibilities.
Let's say you have a well-dressed man with no wallet or phone found shot in a dark alley. It's obviously a mugging gone wrong or a disagreement over purchasing some vice. You round up the usual suspects, they all have alibis. Maybe some traveling crew? You check all out-of-state plates seen last week in the neighborhood, all are boring civilians.
Okay, stage 2. Maybe it's a hit made to look like a mugging gone wrong? Again, you check the usual possibilities: infidelity, business troubles, money troubles at home. Nothing: the victim was a midlevel manager in charge of a boring department, kids are too young to plot against him, no signs of being gay or having a mistress.
You've hit stage 3: psycho killers. While muggings gone wrong are so common that you have a solid solution template, the template for catching psycho killers is very limited: get all other unsolved homicides and start looking for something in common. Any other similar victims? Similar weapons? Similar circumstances? If there's a match, go through every single detail again and try to find a connection.
Sometimes it's something actionable: you have three similar homicides, you trace the bus routes at each location and find out that there's a bus stop you can reach all three locations from (true crime story from the 90s!). Sometimes it's something obvious and not very useful.
Homicides you solve at stage 1 are cookie-cutter, the biggest challenge is doing the paperwork right. Homicides you solve at stage 2 are "interesting". Homicides you (usually don't) solve at stage 3 are fucking frustrating. However, they are a tiny minority of all cases. It's better to centralize this capacity as much as possible (now matter how heart-rending violated and butchered schoolgirls can be) and concentrate on stage 0: minimizing the number of stage 1 homicides that occur.
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It varies, a lot, even within a single jurisdiction. I've seen indictments where police clearly spent hundreds of manhours chasing down every possible lead, and others where a slam-dunk case gets dropped cause no one could be arsed to handle all the court forms. Baltimore's probably (hopefully?) the most extreme example, where proximity to DC has gotten the police department a remarkable breadth of camera systems, license plate scanners, open-source intel analysts, and investigatory resources, and even for murders and just for those where the investigation has been publicly disclosed, there's a wide disparity that's clearly unrelated to the strength of the initial leads.
There's a reputation for 'missing white girl' syndrome to drive that, and it's not wrong, but elderly couples or young kids of any race can get sizable attention and interest, and even the prototypical gang banger on gang banger violence can (rarely) if there's something about the incident that drives political or local interest. There's a reputation for corruption driving a lot of that, it's it's not wrong. Baltimore's GTTF scandal was probably known by 10%+ of the force, which is appalling when they were shaking down civilians, and shocking when you remember that they were selling guns to people shooting at other cops.
((Sometimes "who" matters in a different way: I've seen grand theft on small businesses that were probably destined for the 'when we get to it' pile, except the business coordinated with other similar small businesses to demonstrate an interstate pattern with a clear direction and unique identifying characters, and while that 'only' gets the equivalent of a national wanted poster, it gets a lot of highway patrols looking for an easy to way make a big arrest.))
On the flip side, there's a problem with the world where you don't. It's very easy to come up with a plan where there's no witnesses and any physical evidence is destroyed! You end up with massive selection pressures toward the most dangerous criminal behaviors.
It's definitely and definitionally not possible to provide above-average effort for every case; there's far too much uncertainty to triage cases in a QALY-like manner; it's definitely possible to triage cases at all and find deep investigation still valuable.
I've mixed feelings.
How effective community-oriented or 'broken windows' theory of policing is controversial, and not just for the normal crimonology versus social justice reasons: even the best evidence in favor has been hard to pull apart from normal economic impacts. But the extent that dangerous criminals routinely grow into violent crime from, act on, and rely on casual disruptive law-breaking make Pealian community-oriented boots-on-roads policing very hard to overlook, and it's just not compatible with the All Available Effort approach.
But in turn the overwhelming majority of successful boots-on-roads efforts come in communities with unsophisticated and disorganized criminals, in cultures not predisposed to escalatory violence. They seldom, if ever, can point to clear successes -- even short of actually reducing broad strokes of crime, even just in getting inroads with the civilian populace -- in low-trust societies.
I think, though, this ultimately missed the deeper question: "can they choose"?
A bloodless focus on the easiest-to-solve crimes will near-unavoidably leave cops focusing on trivial but simple-to-prove laws: it's what Sam Francis wanted to be talking about for anarchotyranny. In extreme cases, the knowledge that police will happily pass out tickets or throw someone in jail for selling lossies, but won't handle a serious theft or assault unless the offender is caught redhanded, is strong motivation to never include or cooperate with police at all. Hyperprioritization of serious crime leads to the mirror problem, where those massive investments chasing hard-to-solve crimes end up wasted not just because the crimes are hard, but because the police quickly looses the community relations, familiarity with the domain, and trial experience necessary to bring a case to conviction.
This is a classic Motte comment. Demonstrates the complexity and interdependencies of a problem, relative tradeoffs, real world likely impacts and outcomes, and doesn't use any cliche argumentation, sloganeering, etc.
So, of course, my only response is: Defund The Police because Blue Lives Matter.
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While not a direct response to any of your points, Peel's Principles of Policing (yay for alliteration) seem worth reiterating for the sake of discussion.
More to your point though, my impression is that the vast majority of criminal activity falls into one or both of the following categories. Criminal on criminal (eg gangs fighting over territory), or known trouble-makers making trouble. I think that you're quite right to call out the availability bias, as i suspect that the above are unlikely to earn attention or "clicks" because they are common.
As for clearance rates, I would expect that as police resources contract they would focus more on the stable/wealthy nieghborhoods because thats where thier efforts are most visible and by extension where they can get the most perceived "bang for buck". After all, who cares about some gang-banger getting shot, or at least so (i suspect) the reasoning goes.
Fascinating to see how contemporary evolutions of both "police-work" and the duties and responsibilities of citizenship have evolved to make some of these clearly obsolete
What modern concept of "public favor" is distinguishable from "public opinion," let alone the perceived justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws? What constituency is there for law qua law, independent from the results, or "perceived justice" of the ultimate outcome? In a way, we're all utilitarians now. Kto kago is truly the order of the day.
What private citizen really thinks that stopping people who drive too fast, park in the wrong place, coralling mobs, preventing retail crimes, and investigating serious crimes are all "duties incumbent on every citizen?" Moreover, would we even tolerate a private citizen attempting to undertake any of these tasks?
And those are only the two that seem most egregious to me.
Despite how it’s written in Cyrillic, it’s actually pronounced “Kto kavo” in modern Russian
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For the Gone Girl of Vallejo case, I don't think the problem is that the Police Departmnet didn't have the resources to figure out what was going on. The problem is that they went out of their way to be assholes to potential victims. Putting Aaron Quinn's phone on Airplane mode when he was expecting to receive a call from a potential kidnapper was something that doesn't come down to insufficient resources. It was just plain idiocy.
Jimmy Akin did an episode on the case and he also came to the conclusion that the police were especially incompetent in this case.
That said, I agree in principle that the police should only be equipped to handle 95% of the cases in their jurisdiction, and in the 5% that are more complicated there should be some sort of national team that can deploy when needed with all the resources and skills to solve the weird problems.
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I think about this sketch a lot.
As highlighted by Freddie deBoer, there's so much inconsistency in the standard progressive narrative about what the police are for and what they should do. Cops don't do enough to protect black people, but it's also bad that police allocate disproportionate amount of resources to high-crime (i.e. black and Hispanic) neighbourhoods. Cops don't do enough to protect female victims of crime. Therefore we should defund the police while criticising the police for not doing enough with their already limited budgets.
So much of the debate seems stymied by the availability heuristic. Consumers of true crime content focus on fascinating cases which happened to relatable victims: in other words, bizarre unsolved murders in which the victim was an (A)WF(L)*. Consumers of this content are then bound to come away with the misconception that it's exceedingly common for a man to murder a strange woman and get away with it, which is wrong in almost every way: the overwhelming majority of murder victims are men, most murder victims are killed by someone known to them (although admittedly the American murder clearance rate has plummeted in recent decades, although I suspect that most of the unsolved murders in recent decades were gang violence rather than Ted Bundy copycats). True crime consumers then apply this misconception to their expectations for a functional police force, clamouring for police to Do More to solve murder cases with female victims (but without increasing police budgets in any way, of course).
And sure, maybe if we raised police budgets by 10% every year we might improve the marginal return on murder clearance, solving that 1% of murder cases every year which don't neatly fall into a) gang violence b) domestic violence or c) drunken bar fight. Whereupon the narrative will shift on a dime: "$State spent $10 million sending this Black man with learning disabilities and an underprivileged upbringing who raped and murdered three women to the electric chair! Imagine if that money had been spent on education so that children from similar backgrounds don't follow him down that path." There's no winning.
I think I agree with you that I'm satisfied with a police force that can solve most of the banal murders in a timely fashion, accepting that a small number of really weird cases will go unsolved every year as the price of a free society. I'm not persuaded that increasing police budgets by 10% to catch these weird cases passes a cost-benefit analysis, much like it would be a misallocation of resources to invest millions trying to find a treatment for a disease which only kills 100 people a year.
*"Affluent" and "liberal" are preferred but optional.
The entire industry seems to focus on like the same 50-odd cases, though, since those are the ones that fit the heuristics of interest
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I think you’re on to something. Blindly increasing the budget won’t work though. To me this comes down to a very simple question of what would give maximum results — what would lower the crime rate the fastest (obviously within the bounds of the law and with respect to civil rights). It seems to me that were I a police chief, I’d focus on getting more best cops, getting them trained to handle the situations that they’re more likely to actually see, and putting them on the beat. The reason being that the response time decreasing would likely both clear the crimes actually being committed, but also serve as a deterrent. If you know that you have 3-5 minutes before the cops show up, you might be deterred from robbery. It’s probably going to be tough to rob a place and get away within that timeframe. And having more cops driving around would also deter crime simply because you are more likely to get caught than if there are no cops around.
The other thing I would do has to do with criminal laws. I want a consistent and sure punishment for the crime. If you use a gun in a crime, you will go to prison for three years. No I don’t care about your background. No I don’t care that you’re poor. You pulled out a gun you go to jail. Obviously if you fire the gun the time goes up, and would double or more if you kill somebody. And this again should deter crime, because now not only are you getting caught, but you’re ruining your life for the stuff you’ve decided to rob from a cash register.
Doing those things: showing up quickly, having a show of force on the beat, and having a sure and known punishment for every crime that actually sticks should lower crime rates by quite a bit.
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My understanding as an outsider aligns with yours. The vast majority of murders are either really easy to solve ("he was probably shot by that guy who stole his girl who he's been beefing with for the last three months") or almost impossible to solve ("he could have been shot be any one of 100 gang bangers in the neighborhood"). The genuine who-dun-its are more fun and interesting, but far rarer, and there's probably no systematic way to solve them. At best, you can throw some smart people at these cases and maybe they'll be lucky enough to identify and pursue the right thread. But ultimately, these cases have a terrible cost-to-success ratio for police forces and probably shouldn't be prioritized as a high-level objective. Maybe there's room for private investigators here?
EDIT - Thinking more about it, it makes sense for the FBI to have a system in place for dealing with complex, especially dangerous criminals, like serial killers or Ted Kaczynski types. From a law-and-order perspective, it's probably worth it to spend a lot of money and resources to take these guys out because they set bad precedents and spread social contagions.
Do most serial killers spread social contagions, though? Obviously guys like the Unabomber who've actually communicated with the media are one thing, but it feels like a lot of serial killers targeting the margins of society will never get any meaningful engagement whilst conducting their business. It's only after their investigation, capture and public trials that the real visibility becomes a thing.
I don't know about "most" serial killers, but IIRC, a lot of the most high-profile ones were big in the 1970s and early 80s, and then serial killing went into decline. Like school shootings, it seemed to be partially driven by social contagion.
From my true crime reading, the (sort of) consensus is that
There were probably just as many Serial Killers before the 1970s and 80s, but due to policing practices they weren't identified as serial killers. In fact, if their victims were largely prostitutes or other edge-of-society types, its likely the cops launched no investigation whatsoever.
Starting in the 1990s, DNA evidence made it somewhat actually easier to catch bad guys, but perceptively WAY easier. Phrased differently, people started to think they were leaving testable amounts of DNA all over the place and that cops could just zap it with a magic DNA laser and get an immediate location on a 'perp'. This may have acted as an effective enough disincentive for would-be killers.
The awareness of the existence of serial killers and general lower society wide trust made people (especially younger women) generally more aware of surroundings and personal safety.
When smartphones arrive on scene, not only is everyone always carrying around their own personal recording studio and security camera, they're also carrying around perfect evidence of their social network. If someone kills you today, there's a good chance they're in the top 10 of your most recent text messages.
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It comes down to whether they want the attention; I would be surprised if a smart one could not reliably get visibility by putting culture war bait for the media.
If a killer left a note or sent letters to the media saying he was doing it "for President Trump", do you really think the media would be able to contain themselves from making it a national issue? And the right's reaction when there's hints of a killer being trans or an illegal gives little doubt that they'd be just as impossible to contain if they were in a position of power in the media.
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