violence

i did an interview today with wcco’s jason derusha (at left). i like his regular good question reports, in which local experts answer everything from how do i know my bank is safe? to why does music bring us back?

our conversation about international crime rates should air at 10 tonight. i would’ve referred this one to colleagues who do more comparative research, but it can be tough to catch folks during the summer. i’m expecting some snarky comments on my jeans and cleanest-dirty-shirt wardrobe. for years, i kept an emergency blue suit in my office for just such occasions, but retired it last month in a fit of housekeeping.

brad k. sends word of a colorado state study linking bumper stickers to road rage. territoriality is the hypothesized mechanism. here’s the newsweek synopsis, with a link to the authors and article:

As scientists led by Lucy Troup and her student William Szlemko of Colorado State University report in the June issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, it’s a simple matter of territoriality. Researchers have long known that drivers who have a strong sense of personal space while in their vehicle are more likely to be road-ragers, and the more someone plasters his vehicle with bumper stickers and decals the more territorial he feels about the space inside.

and a few lines from the abstract:

Aggressive driving may occur when social norms for defending a primary territory (i.e., one’s automobile) become confused with less aggressive norms for defending a public territory (i.e., the road). Both number of territory markers (e.g., bumper stickers, decals) and attachment to the vehicle were significant predictors of aggressive driving.

when i pitched this story to the contexts board as a possible discoveries piece, i was asked whether the sentiment expressed on the bumper sticker made any difference. apparently not. while the number of stickers is highly predictive, the researchers found no evidence that visualize whirled peas was any less dangerous than they’ll have to pry my AK-47 from my cold dead fingers.

i suppose territoriality is a reasonable explanation, though my first thought was that badges, posters, stickers, and t-shirts are expressions of extroversion, which might be directly linked to externalizing behaviors such as bird-flippin’ and roadside dukers.

but now i’m buying the researchers’ argument and thinking it might be territoriality after all — i’ve been driving much more aggressively since the arrival of those ICUDV8 license plates.

we’re celebrating a new ph.d. in the department, after heather hlavka’s successful defense of her dissertation, the trouble with telling: children’s constructions of sexual abuse.

dr. hlavka analyzed ten years of case files and videotaped forensic interviews with children seen for suspected cases of sexual abuse. the diss is powerful stuff, rendered with great care, sensitivity, and sophistication. she shows how the meaning of sexual abuse is negotiated in interaction with adults, but keeps the children’s voices front-and-center throughout. a systematic research design yields clear (and disturbing) generalizations about social power and barriers to disclosure. in short, she’s got me questioning just about everything we (think we) know about the age, race, class, and gender distribution of child sexual abuse.

dr. hlavka will be professin’ at marquette university this fall, where she will join darren wheelock, a fellow minnversity sociologist.

larry oakes of the strib offers a well-researched look at sex offender civil commitment in minnesota. a few bullets:

• 19 states and the federal government now detain former prison inmates for indefinite involuntary treatment.
• the state now has the highest rate of sex offender civil commitments, locking up 544 men and 1 woman.
• minnesota numbers have spiked dramatically since a heinous 2003 case.
• it costs $134,000 per inmate per year in the minnesota sex offender program, relative to $45,000 per inmate per year in state prison, $15,000 per year for outpatient treatment, $10,000 per year for gps monitoring, and $4,000 per year for electronic home monitoring.
• recidivism has dropped dramatically. as a 2007 state department of corrections report concludes: “due to the dramatic decrease in sexual recidivism since the early 1990s, recent sexual reoffense rates have been very low, thus significantly limiting the extent to which sexual reoffending can be further reduced.”

here’s the lead:

In the 14 years since Minnesota’s Sexually Dangerous Persons Act cleared the way for the state to detain hundreds of paroled sex offenders in prison-like treatment centers, just 24 men have met what has proved to be the only acceptable standard for release.

They died.

“We would say, ‘Another one completed treatment,'” said Andrew Babcock, a former guard and counselor in the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP).

hillary clinton unveiled an ambitious $4 billion proposal to halve the homicide rate in major american cities. the plan involves adding 100,000 new police officers and targeting gangs, drug markets, and illegal gun trafficking.

you might recognize (all of?) these elements from the 1992 clinton crime bill. this is great news for my teaching, since i can now dust off a killer essay question on the anticipated impact of 100,000 officers on the perceived certainty of apprehension and punishment. i’m also intrigued by the weapons interdiction aspects of the proposal. if you click on the chart above, you’ll see how gun homicide rates have fluctuated wildly relative to non-gun rates over the past three decades.

you might have heard the story of the 19-year-old colorado couple who busted up a video store fighting over their 4-year-old’s gang affiliation. here’s the denver post version:

A heated dispute between two parents about what street gang their son should join resulted in one parent threatening to kill the other, Commerce City police say. The center of the battle is a 4-year-old boy. The child was born to parents, who are not married, when they were about 15 years old, said Sgt. Joe Sandoval of the Commerce City Police Department.

On Saturday, the boy’s father, Joseph Manzanares, allegedly went to the Hollywood Video at 5961 E. 64th Ave., where his ex-girlfriend and the mother of the boy works. There, according to Sandoval, Manzanares, 19, began knocking over several displays in the video store, as well as knocking a computer off a counter. Manzanares began to verbally threaten the woman, including saying he was going to “kill” her, said the police sergeant. Manzanares then ran out of the store and was arrested a short time later at his residence.

The mother of the child told police that she and the boy’s father have been involved in ongoing domestic disputes regarding their son. The woman said she is a “Crip” gang member and that Manzanares is a “Baller” gang member, and “they have different ideas on how the baby should be raised,” said Sandoval. “Basically she said they cannot agree on which gang the baby would ‘claim,’ ” Sandoval said. Sandoval said the “Ballers” were formerly known as the “Westside Ballers.” He said the father is Latino; the mother, African-American.

On Tuesday, Manzanares pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, a Class 1 petty offense. A charge of harassment, a Class 3 misdemeanor, was dismissed. Adams County Judge Simon Mole sentenced Manzanares to 12 months probation and imposed $835 in court costs and fees.

i’ve heard the story spun in four ways:

1. criminals do the darnedest things. this lighthearted approach, often delivered with a chuckle at the end of a newscast, portrays people convicted of crimes as idiots. it is generally better-suited to stories involving burglars caught in chimneys, however, than to those involving domestic disputes and children.

2. suffer the children. the newsreaders usually put on a frowny face when they tell stories about innocent kids caught in bad circumstances. sometimes progressive reforms are suggested, though simple tsk-tsking is more common.

3. end of the world as we know it. older generations sometimes take a well-practiced “hell in a handbasket” approach to such stories. this one seems to bring together a host of social pathologies, embodying all that a talk-radio commentator identifies as wrong or evil about contemporary society.

4. those people. every report that i’ve seen or heard about this case notes the race and ethnicity of the mother and father, though this information really isn’t central to beefs over gang affiliation. beyond simply identifying the parents, explicit racist stereotyping emerged in at least one of the reports i saw. you can bet that some profane and exaggerated version of this story will show up on every white nationalist site on the web.

though the manzanares case seems newsworthy, i suspect the full story is pretty mundane. there’s nothing new about couples fighting over their children, particularly the friends and relatives to which their children will be exposed. i’d guess that mr. manzanares was likely upset about the continuing social affiliations of his child’s mother as well as those of his child. there’s also nothing new about 15-year-old parents having an especially tough time of it, regardless of whether they’ve been involved in gangs.

as they age and take on new responsibilities, most gang-involved young people desist from gang involvement. if there’s anything positive to find in this story, it is that two kids who had a kid at 15 remain passionately committed to at least some vision of the child’s best interests.

i’ve had little time online or elsewhere the past few weeks, as i’ve struggled to keep pace with chair / editor / teacher / scholar / father duties. one story that caught my eye, however, came via amelia at the crawler. apparently, slaughterhouse workers on the killing floor exhibit relatively high rates of post-traumatic stress. similarly, communities with slaughterhouses exhibit relatively high rates of violent crime.

i haven’t assessed the researchers’ causal claims, but the finding fits my experience growing up around the south st. paul stockyards and nearby processing plants. i knew a few shell-shocked former cattle-killers who ran screaming to minimum-wage restaurant jobs at a fraction of their former pay. i remember one tough-guy cook whose probation officer set him up in some kind of full-time throat-slitting or bludgeoning job. it was a good job, he said, but he just couldn’t cut it.

the story is timely, since tomorrow marks south st. paul’s last cattle auction. it was evidently the world’s busiest livestock market when i was growing up, but the yards have been empty for years. i wonder whether south st. paul is becoming significantly less stressful or violent…

the los angeles times maintains a homicide report blog with the names, faces, and brief stories of each of the area’s murder victims. the daily entries quickly orient readers to the super-concentration of homicide along age, race, class, and gender lines. the grim catalog is powerfully affecting, even for those familiar with the bivariate correlates of violent victimization. we might already know that young african american and latino men from poor neighborhoods are disproportionately victimized, but we might better appreciate the force of such patterns after reading the individual stories arrayed on page after page of cases.

via nij: the national institute of Justice is hosting an online discussion forum this week on research bearing on the prison rape elimination act. even basic questions about the prevalence of prison sexual assault are fiercely contested, so i’d expect a lively discussion.

Sexual Victimization in Prisons: Moving Toward Elimination

February 7, 2008: 2pm–4pm ESTFree online event. Registration required.
One of every 22 men and women sentenced to imprisonment in the United States reported that they were assaulted sexually while incarcerated.

Sexual victimization in prisons is the issue, elimination is the goal. Join a group of experts to discuss the state of Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) research—what data is available and what’s yet to come. The experts will examine ways to move from better understanding to reliable prevention and eventual elimination. View a detailed description of the event and register today.

saturday’s pi-press reported on two local robberies involving a chatline. in each case, dudes traveled to a minneapolis apartment to visit a woman they’d met on livelinks.

insomniacs are likely familiar with late-night television ads for livelinks. these typically feature attractive semi-clothed college-age women writhing flirtatiously while chatting on the phone.

when the local men arrived to meet the woman with whom they’d been speaking, they were greeted by a bat-wielding boyfriend and quickly relieved of their wallets and credit cards. according to the affidavit,

the woman told the man to bring DVDs, vodka and Swisher Sweets cigars. “Once he arrived, the female met him at the door,” the affidavit says. “She asked him for 20 dollars, which he gave her, then a male appeared from another room.” Dude came with a gun in one hand, a bat in the other,” the victim told the Pioneer Press.

fortunately, nobody was seriously hurt. this is a good scam because it is easy to attract men to a female stranger’s apartment, especially when they have visions of late-night commercials dancing in their heads. this is a terrible and short-lived scam, however, because the men are not so complicit that they would be reluctant to contact the police. and, of course, they could provide the police with very good directions to the address.

do you think the cigars were for the sweet talker or for the gun/bat-wielding boyfriend?