Tagcrime

Juggalos, media scares, and the West Memphis 3

ICP on Nightline

New essay up at Mediapunk:

It’s difficult to estimate the total number of Juggalos. The 2009 Gathering of Juggalos had 20,000 people in attendence. The most recent ICP album sold about 50,000 copies in the first week. But let’s be conservative and go with the 20,000 estimate. (I actually suspect it’s much higher than this.)

Nightline cites only 3 instances of reported Juggalos actually murdering anyone. To be charitable, let’s assume there are 10 people who are both Juggalos and murderers. That would mean AT MOST .05% of Juggalos are murderers. Granted that’s a significantly higher percentage than the US population at large (there were 16,272 murders in 2008 and the US had a population of about 305 million). But less than 1%, at most, isn’t exactly cause for alarm. And I would think Arizona’s finest would be better served by realizing that 99.94 percent of murders are committed by non-Juggalos and adjusting their law enforcement priorities accordingly. (As I write this, the number of murders committed per year by Toby Keith fans is currently unavailable.) […]

And a preemptive response to the inevitable jokes about how Juggalos (re: poor rural teenages who don’t fit in) deserve imprisonment, death, or worse for their fashion-sins: go right right ahead and fuck off and die already.

Mediapunk: Juggalos, media scares, and the West Memphis 3

Identifying People by their Bacteria

bacteria plate

The human body hosts hundreds of bacterial species that perform various salubrious housekeeping chores, from aiding digestion to helping the immune system identify foreign invaders. Every person—even an identical twin—has a unique distribution of bacteria on various body areas. Now some researchers are suggesting that these individual differences could lead to the development of new crime-solving tools.

Science: CSI’s Latest Clue—Bacteria

(via Schneier on Security)

Occult Profiling: Where it comes from and why it’s worth fighting

West Memphas Three

In In Pursuit of Satan: The Police and the Occult, Robert Hicks describes how news reporters get their misinformation about so-called occult crimes from police. Police, in turn, learn what they know from seminars – and the information disseminated at those seminars comes from conservative Christian sources.

“Cult officers employ fundamentalist rhetoric, distribute literature that emanates from fundamentalist authorities, and sometimes offer bibliographies giving many fundamentalist publications,” Hicks writes. “Further, cult cops sometimes team up with clergy to give Satanism seminars.”

At the same time, police are discouraged from studying primary sources on the occult, according to Kail. “One law enforcement guide warns: ‘Intense study of resource books and materials by occult sources is hazardous. Preferred is studying overviews and synopses by credible authors who have studied the occult traditions. The unknown realm of the occult beckons with many lures. Study and/or experimentation are to be avoided. There are safer ways to test for poisonous chemicals than by tasting them.’”

Plutonica: Occult Profiling: Where it comes from and why it’s worth fighting

White House Cyber Czar: ‘There Is No Cyberwar’

White House Cyber Czar Howard Schmidt

Howard Schmidt, the new cybersecurity czar for the Obama administration, has a short answer for the drumbeat of rhetoric claiming the United States is caught up in a cyberwar that it is losing.

“There is no cyberwar,” Schmidt told Wired.com in a sit-down interview Wednesday at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.

“I think that is a terrible metaphor and I think that is a terrible concept,” Schmidt said. “There are no winners in that environment.”

Instead, Schmidt said the government needs to focus its cybersecurity efforts to fight online crime and espionage.

His stance contradicts Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence who made headlines last week when he testified to Congress that the country was already in the midst of a cyberwar — and was losing it.

Threat Level: White House Cyber Czar: ‘There Is No Cyberwar’

See also:

Cyberwar Hype Intended to Destroy the Open Internet

Cyber warfare: don’t inflate it, don’t underestimate it

Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative

American Conservative: Hispanics don’t commit more crimes than whites

American Conservative - His-panic

The evidence presented here powerfully refutes the widespread popular belief that America’s Hispanics have high crime rates. Instead, their criminality seems to fall near the center of the white national distribution, being somewhat higher than white New Englanders but somewhat lower than white Southerners. Taken as a whole, the mass of statistical evidence constitutes strong support for the “null hypothesis,” namely that Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age.

We must bear in mind that most Hispanics are still of very recent immigrant origins and thus are considerably poorer than the average American. There actually does exist a connection between poverty and crime, even if liberals make such a claim, and since today’s Hispanic population has roughly the same crime rate as far more affluent whites, there is every reason to expect that this crime rate will drop further as Hispanics continue to move up the economic ladder. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Douglas Besharov pointed out in an important but insufficiently noticed October 2007 New York Times column, the last decade or two have seen an extremely rapid economic advance for most of America’s Hispanic population. 10 This rise may be connected with the simultaneous and unexpectedly rapid drop in urban crime rates throughout the country.

Read More – American Conservative: His-Panic

Via Radley Balko who notes:

For a magazine co-founded by anti-immigration paleocons Pat Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos, the story risks alienating a hell of a lot of the magazine’s readers.

See also Balko’s article “The El Paso Miracle.”

‘Cyber Genome Project’ kicked off by DARPA

dna

Applecart-bothering Pentagon boffinry bureau DARPA is at it again. This time, the military scientists want to establish a “Cyber Genome” project which will allow any digital artifact – a document, a piece of malware – to be probed to its very origins. […]

Or in other words, any code you write, perhaps even any document you create, might one day be traceable back to you – just as your DNA could be if found at a crime scene, and just as it used to be possible to identify radio operators even on encrypted channels by the distinctive “fist” with which they operated their Morse keys. Or something like that, anyway.

The Register: ‘Cyber Genome Project’ kicked off by DARPA

(via William Gibson)

Hard to see this working out well.

Is tech taking us to a world more medieval than modern?

cyberwarfare

For most people over most of man’s time, however, history is more like a mob movie than a courtroom drama: The Vikings burn the village, the Huns or Mongols ride through with swords, child soldiers arrive in pickup trucks. Violence is the only argument. That is history, too chaotic and reactive for any organized telling.

The mayhem Menn portrays is not that stark, but it seems closer to that than to a world of rules and order. Cybergangs rise and fall in varying degrees of anonymity and alliances with Russian, Chinese and other governments that are more ad hoc than understood. Norms of behavior among individuals and governments are a moving target. Crimes are not solved as much as controlled, through informal alliances of small agencies within and outside the state, or when there is publicity of the crimes that embarrasses higher ups in government. It is crime and crime fighting within a massive, illicit social network, fueled on greed, speed and reputation.

Forbes: The Web’s Return To Chaos

(via Bruce Sterling)

This sounds partially right, except that it overlooks the amount of thuggish violence governments have continued to be involved in – wars, strikes, proxy wars, assassinations, etc. If we’re moving into a world of cyberwarfare instead of physical warfare: great. I’d rather people get their “identities stolen” than end up dead. I’d like to think that’s happening, rather than a mere expansion of aggression. Whatever the case, there’s never been a time when governments didn’t act like gangs.

The Girl Who Conned The Ivy League

Esther Reed

“She’s a criminal genius,” says Jon Campbell, the South Carolina police detective who eventually exposed her trail of deceit. “She was manipulative, controlling, brilliant. We didn’t know what to make of her.” With so many unanswered questions, authorities treated Esther Reed’s disappearance as an all-out emergency, suspecting her not only of fraud but of murder and international espionage. The tabloids had a field day with this brazen girl who had conned her way into the Ivy League; front-page headlines worried over her whereabouts and wondered what dangerous secrets she might be keeping.

No one guessed the truth, which was simpler, and therefore stranger, than their wildest theories: that the scared young woman so hotly pursued by South Carolina police, the Secret Service, federal marshals and even the U.S. Army was actually on a bizarre and misguided journey of self-discovery. A 28-year-old high school dropout from Montana, Esther Reed just wanted to stop being Esther Reed and to embark on a new, better life of her own design. She was pursuing the American Dream, with a twist: Rather than forge a new identity from scratch, she would steal someone else’s and remake it to suit her own needs. Reed never imagined that her ill-conceived self-help program would land her on America’s Most Wanted and brand her as a threat to national security — or that for one brokenhearted family in South Carolina, the fulfillment of her hopes and dreams would mean the end of their own.

Rolling Stone: The Girl Who Conned The Ivy League

(via mthing)

Facebook fugitive back in custody

A prisoner who updated his Facebook profile while on the run from an open prison in Suffolk has been captured.

Suffolk Police said burglar Craig Lynch, 28, who absconded from Hollesley Bay Prison on 23 September, was arrested in Kent on Tuesday night.

He has been charged with escaping from lawful custody and was remanded in custody at Bexleyheath magistrates.

BBC: Facebook fugitive back in custody

Previously: Escaped prisoner taunts police on Facebook

Youth who believe they will die young more likely to commit crimes

Georgia State University Criminal Justice experts Timothy Brezina, Volkan Topalli and economist Erdal Tekin, have released a unique study that indicates that although young criminals are aware of the risks of violent injury, death or punishment, the possibility of a shorter life span encourages them to focus more on the “here and now.”

“It turns out that if you boil it all down the more you think you are going to die young the more likely it is that you are going to engage in criminality and violence,” Topalli said. “This is the opposite of what most people think, because most people think that if you think you’re going to die soon you become depressed and you wouldn’t commit crimes.”

The research “Might not be a Tomorrow,” is among the first Criminal Justice studies to simultaneously include one-on-one offender interviews with an econometric analysis of nation-wide adolescent data to provide a better understanding of why young people tend to pursue high-risk behaviors associated with immediate rewards, which include crime and violence.

Science Daily: Might Not Be a Tomorrow: Youth Anticipate Early Death

“Most people think that if you think you’re going to die soon you become depressed and you wouldn’t commit crimes.”

What? Does anyone actually believe that? How are these results the least bit surprising?

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