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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 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.
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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