It’s not just mass shooters
Memphis Police released footage from four cameras that captured the fatal beating of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols. Nichols died three days after his arrest.
Videos of police beating Tyre Nichols in Memphis. I just can’t watch them this morning. But a New York Times special report on mass shootings clicked with the reported violence of the policemen who beat the Black motorist (ultimately to death) during a traffic stop.
“Jillian Peterson is a professor of criminology at Hamline University. James Densley is a professor of criminal justice at Metro State University. Together they run the Violence Project and are the authors of ‘The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic‘,” reads their bio in The Times. They intersperse their conclusions about 50 years of mass shootings with terse summaries of what motivated shooters they studied (emphasis mine):
These are abridged details from profiles of the suspected or convicted perpetrators of more than 150 mass shootings in the United States.
The profiles are based on news reports, public documents and our conversations with the shooters’ friends, colleagues, social workers and teachers.
These events have become more frequent and more deadly over time. One-third of all the mass shootings in our study occurred in the last decade.
This is no coincidence. The killings are not just random acts of violence but rather a symptom of a deeper societal problem: the continued rise of “deaths of despair.”
This term has been used to explain increasing mortality rates among predominantly middle-aged white men caused by suicide, drug overdose and alcohol abuse.
We think the concept of “deaths of despair” also helps explain the accelerating frequency of mass shootings in this country.
Nearly all the killers we profile are men.
Many were socially isolated from their families or their communities and felt a sense of alienation.
Many of these men felt that their identities were under attack.
Often, they turned to extreme ideologies to cope with their failures and to find a sense of purpose.
Most chose not to ask for help when confronted with hardship, like a breakup or being fired from their job.
They chose mass shootings as a way to seize power and attention, forcing others to witness their pain while attempting to end their lives in a way that only they controlled.
These are public spectacles of violence intended as final acts.
Whether it’s self-inflicted, or comes at the hands of police officers or after life in prison, a mass shooting is a form of suicide.
This is something that separates mass shootings from other crimes and is why traditional preventive measures like increased armed security or harsh criminal sentences will do little to stop them.
Mass shooters are not the victims. But in order to prevent future tragedies we must treat the underlying pathologies that feed the shooters’ despair.
Mass shootings must no longer be written off as “inexplicable” episodes of “unthinkable” violence.
Our communities and governments need to find ways to reduce social isolation more broadly and improve access to mental health care and substance abuse treatment.
Increased investment in suicide prevention, crisis intervention and reporting systems for violent threats will help prevent desperate people from becoming mass shooters.
These steps must be taken not in place of but in addition to passing widely supported gun safety laws like background checks, longer waiting periods, safer gun storage requirements and red flag laws.
Instead, we have allowed mass shootings to become normalized in American culture, and ask our children to participate in active shooter drills and pass through metal detectors on their way to class.
We say “never again” and yet less than 48 hours elapsed between the shootings in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, Calif. “Again” keeps happening because mass shooters are not monsters who appear out of thin air.
Mass shooters live among us. They are us. They are for the most part the men and boys we know. And they can be stopped before they pull the trigger.
I’m no expert, but that conclusion sounds dubious. Maybe it would help if the despairing had no trigger to pull. But that’s just me. I wrote the other day, “We will entertain solutions to the plague of gun violence only so long as they do not cost us our guns.”
Police violence is itself a bit of a plague. Is there a connection?
“Many of these men felt that their identities were under attack.”
“They chose mass shootings as a way to seize power and attention …”
How many people choose police work not out of a desire for public service, but as a means of defining themselves and of seizing power and attention? As a means of acquiring the power of life and death exercised under color of law? What “underlying pathologies” are we not screening out in the hiring process? Or are police academies training in pathologies?
I’ve written repeatedly about the “officer survival movement” that trains cops to perceive places they patrol not as neighborhoods but as battlefields to survive each day. Anyone they encounter might be an enemy combatant as though they are not in Memphis but in Baghdad. Cops these days are trained not so much as protectors as warriors.
Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn J. Davis said upon watching videos of her officers beating Nichols (ultimately to death), “You’re gonna see acts that defy humanity. You’re gonna see a disregard for life, duty of care that we’re all sworn to, and a level of physical interaction that is above and beyond what is required in law enforcement. And I’m sure that — as I said before — that individuals watching will feel what the family felt. And if you don’t, you’re not a human being.”
U.S. troops on the whole show more discipline in combat.
The five fired officers (all Black) each “face charges of second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression. Four of the five officers had posted bond and been released from custody by Friday morning, according to court and jail records.”
Is it time to consider that people capable of such acts, too, “are not monsters who appear out of thin air”? Like mass shooters, nearly all killer cops are men. Are they “socially isolated from their families or their communities” by their training? Does police training instill a “sense of alienation” that leads them to commit acts that “defy humanity”? Is the sense of power that comes with carrying pepper spray, tasers, and guns what attracts some people to police work? Is it time to consider that police killings no longer be written off as “inexplicable” episodes of “unthinkable” violence?
It’s not my area. But perhaps people whose area it is should burrow into the behaviors of killer police officers as Peterson and Densley have mass shooters.