Transcript
Marshall Poe:
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network and you're listening to an episode on Grinnell College's Authors and Artist podcast. Today, I'm very pleased to say we have Jill Peterson on the show. She, together with her co-author, James Densley, has written a very timely book called The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic. We'll be talking about that book during the course of the interview today. Jill, welcome to the show.
Jillian Peterson:
Thank you so much for having me.
Marshall Poe:
My pleasure. Could you begin the interview by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Jillian Peterson:
Sure. I graduated from Grinnell College in 2003 with a sociology degree. And actually when I was at Grinnell, I did an internship with an alum who was a forensic social worker in Chicago, which is what kind of set me down the path that I'm now on. After I graduated, I worked as an investigator at the New York Capital Defender's Office in New York City, investigating the life histories of men who were facing the death penalty in New York for a number of years. And then after New York got rid of the death penalty, I went to graduate school out in California where I got a PhD in Psychology and Social Behavior. I am now a associate professor of criminology at Hamline College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I'm also co-founder of the nonprofit, The Violence Project.
Marshall Poe:
Yes. Well, let's talk a little bit about The Violence Project. What is it?
Jillian Peterson:
Yes. It started as a research study about five years ago, kind of a code word for the research that we were doing into the lives of mass shooters. It since developed into a nonprofit research center that's a nonpartisan center focused on using data and research to prevent violence.
Marshall Poe:
The project itself involved the collection of a lot of data, and this manifests itself in the book. I should tell the listeners that the book is very data-rich, and this is one thing that I appreciate about it because we have lots of intuitions about mass violence; I think many of them are wrong. And it's nice to actually see data from someone like Jill who can show us where our intuitions are right and wrong. How did you collect the data for the substance of this book?
Jillian Peterson:
We started with just kind of a group of passionate students who wanted to volunteer, and me and my co-author, James Densley, we realized that there was so little information about mass shooters out there. I come from a background of really trying to understand the life histories of perpetrators to understand what these pathways to violence look like so we can build intervention and prevention programs. And then when it came to mass shootings, it was clear that we did not understand who these perpetrators were, where they were coming from, why we were seeing so many of these shootings. So we started by making a list of every perpetrator who had killed four or more people in a public space going back to 1966. There's about 180 perpetrators. And then we coded them on about 200 different pieces of life history information, all using publicly available records.
The students we were working with would kind of dig into the dark corners of the internet and find as much information as they could and we built this into this kind of massive database. And then we got funding from the National Institute of Justice, which is the research arm of the Department of Justice, that led us really kind of amplify the work, move more quickly, and also conduct interviews across the country. We interviewed perpetrators of mass shootings, people who knew perpetrators, like parents and siblings, and also victims and first responders. It became this really kind of comprehensive research study into the lives of these perpetrators.
Marshall Poe:
This is really the first time we have actual empirical data about these horrific events. I don't know if it's the first time, but it's a principal contribution there too.
Jillian Peterson:
Yes. I think people had collected kind of the who, what, where, and why. I would say who, what, where, maybe not the why. So this is the first time there's really a deep dive into, what did the childhoods look like of these perpetrators? What were the days and weeks like? What mental health diagnoses did they have? Did they play violent video games? All these things that we talk about when we talk about public policy and we talk about mass shootings in the media, this is the first time we'd put together the data.
Marshall Poe:
Well, congratulations on that. I can only imagine how much work it was. I don't think people realize how hard this work is.
Jillian Peterson:
It really is.
Marshall Poe:
It's very hard. Let's get right into the data. One of my intuitions tells me that the number of mass shootings, and this is a particular kind of shooting, it takes place in a public space, it is four or more people. Is that right?
Jillian Peterson:
Yes. Four or more people killed.
Marshall Poe:
Within those confines, my intuition tells me that the number of these things has gone up over the last, I don't know how many decades. Is that true?
Jillian Peterson:
That is true. It is really important to be precise about the definition. Because depending on what definition you use, you get all sorts of different numbers. We use this really conservative definition because we were really interested in this very specific phenomenon of a person walking into a public space, shooting indiscriminately, and then four or more people killed, is kind of the threshold used by the FBI in different sort of research institutions, so we went with that one. And using that definition, yes, you see that they have been rising over time. The death counts have been getting higher over time as well. With the worst years on record being 2017, 2018, 2019, although I think '21, we might surpass that depending on how the year goes.
Marshall Poe:
It is actually empirically true that the frequency of these, that still all very rare events, is going up?
Jillian Peterson:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
Yes. We can stand on that as finding. Now again, one of my intuitions tells me that this is, to use a little bit of fancy terminology here, it's a kind of psychogenic... I don't know what word I'm looking for here, that people are copying one another. You see what I'm saying? That it's like hysteria, but you saw this for example with anorexia. Anorexia got introduced, suddenly a lot of young women were finding they had anorexia. And many people said that this is some sort of psychogenic. Again, I can't find the word. Epidemic, I guess, of this. Do you think this is a reasonable explanation of why we're seeing an increase in the number of these things?
Jillian Peterson:
Yes, I do certainly think that's a part of it. In the book we call it as social contagion.
Marshall Poe:
That's better. I don't know how I could come up with that. I'm sorry listeners, I couldn't come up with social contagion.
Jillian Peterson:
We do see that. When you see mass shootings kind of cluster, so there'll be one will happen and then two or three will quickly follow. We've seen this over time when you study the lives of perpetrators, they study each other. They do. They see themselves and the perpetrators that came before them, they go into chat rooms and dark corners of the internet where these perpetrators are really celebrated and they can kind of get radicalized with these other individuals who are thinking like them. And then it does seem to be that when someone is kind of on the edge, when someone is hopeless and angry and suicidal, someone does this and it gets this huge amount of media attention, their face is all over the news, their manifestos going viral. It does inspire sometimes people to come behind them, so that social contagion aspect, we know, is a part of this.
Marshall Poe:
So if we see one, then probabilistically the chances that there will be another is increased in the time thereafter.
Jillian Peterson:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
Because of the social contagion, yes. I see just what you mean. Let's talk a little bit about why these mass shooters shoot. One of the things that you study in The Violence Project is, you call it a noticeable crisis in the period before the shooting. How do you identify someone who's having a noticeable crisis and what percentage of the shooters were having noticeable crises?
Jillian Peterson:
Our data shows, it's about 82% of perpetrators, we could say, were in a noticeable crisis, which we define as a market change in behavior from their own baseline and it's a short period of time. It's not something that goes on forever. It's a period of time where whatever's happening in their life is overwhelming their ability to cope and they are acting different. And that different does look a little bit different for each perpetrator. Some of them get more aggressive or more agitated or paranoid. Some of them are isolating, but people around them are noticing that things are different and that they're acting strange. During this period of time, a lot of them actually leak their plans, which leakage is a term that means kind of telling other people what you're planning to do. So they might post about it on social media or tell their peers. It's kind of this really important period of time where their behavior's changing, they're talking about violence, they're planning, and we see that really consistently in these perpetrators. It's a period of time where we think intervention is really critical.
Marshall Poe:
This is a point where an observant person might see someone they know acting, well, not to find a point on it strangely. And then this heightened awareness might lead to notifying someone. I'm interested in why they make their plans public. Did you get any insight into why they do that? Again, it kind of reminds me of the, well again, a warning to the listeners, I'm going to talk a little bit about suicide. So if this is concerning to you, don't listen, that people will signal their intention to commit suicide before they do it.
Jillian Peterson:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
Is there a similar sort of thing going? Is this a cry for help?
Jillian Peterson:
It is. That's what our research shows. We did a study that we published in JAMA where we looked at, is leakage this sort of excitement, narcissistic type of thing, more so, how serial killers might kind of play with the police? That was one theory. And then the other theory is that it is more of a last minute cry for help, like somebody see what I'm doing and reach out. And we found that it is more of a cry for help. And when we talked to perpetrators, they would say it was more of a cry for help, kind of this last minute cry into the void to say, "I'm thinking about this. Is anyone going to stop me?" And there are horrific homicides, but in addition, they're designed to be the perpetrator's final act. The perpetrator goes in without any escape plan. They're either going to kill themselves, be killed, or spend the rest of their life in prison. And so, a lot of what we know actually from the suicide prevention world can be really applicable when we're talking about preventing mass shootings.
Marshall Poe:
Let's talk a little bit about the locale of these. Once somebody has sadly decided to embark on this horrible endeavor, then they have to pick a place to do it. And your data said it's constrained to public places. But what kind of public places do these generally occur?
Jillian Peterson:
Perpetrators tend to pick a place that is representative of their grievance with the world. What we see is a lot of these perpetrators are kind of self-loathing, suicidal, depressed, isolated, hopeless. Then there's a point at which that turns and they kind of think, "Whose fault is this that I feel this way?" Some people pick their school because they blame their peers, other perpetrators pick racial groups or women.
Marshall Poe:
I'm sorry, can I interrupt you? Just as you said, other people pick their workplace, it broke up a little bit. If you can just start with the sentence, other people pick their workplace.
Jillian Peterson:
Sure. Other people pick their workplace, other perpetrators pick racial groups or religious groups or women that they've decided this is whose fault it is. And so the location ends up being representative of their grievance with the world. And these are really, we call them a form of performance crime. It is meant to be watched and witnessed. The goal is to make the biggest headlines, to be seen in a way for doing this, in a way that these perpetrators aren't seen in life, to be kind of remembered and make the history books. They also pick locations where they're going to have the biggest headlines.
Marshall Poe:
This points to the second kind of intervention. The first one, just to remind the listeners was, if you see someone in noticeable crisis and they seem to be signaling an intent to do this, you definitely want to contact somebody.
Jillian Peterson:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
Yes. The second one is about these locations. Would it be advisable, and some people claim it should be, to somehow protect these locations better than we do? Is the frequency of these events such that we need to make them well, to use a military phrase, kind of harder targets? Is this advisable in any way? Because you hear people talking about, "We should arm school teachers," and stuff like this, I don't know, but is this something that we should think about?
Jillian Peterson:
I mean, our data would say no, only because most perpetrators are insiders. These are not outsiders coming into a location that they don't know. Perpetrators of school shootings are students of the school, perpetrators of workplace shootings work at that location. They are moving in and out of that security. They know where the armed officers are, they've been through the active shooter drills, they know how this all works. And so, I think a lot of things we do in terms of hardening, assume it's sort of these outsiders coming in. The reality is, this is insiders. And so a lot of that hardening won't be as effective. Actually, what we know is protective, particularly in schools, is things like warm, trusting environments with really strong relationships and some of that hardening can run counter to the type of environments we know kind of foster this protective safe school.
Marshall Poe:
Again, another one of my intuitions, which I'm sure is probably wrong, well, I don't know I'll ask you, is that somehow these people are deeply mentally ill. Not that they're going through some sort of momentary crisis, but they are diagnosably mentally ill in some way that we should probably have seen. Is this true?
Jillian Peterson:
It's a really complicated question, and I will say that question is the one that originally led me in to studying mass shootings. Because before this, my area of research really was the relationship between mental illness and violence. When we talk about mass shootings, that comes up again and again and again. We really did a deep dive into this. Who's been diagnosed? Who's been in counseling? Who takes medication? Who's been hospitalized previously? Who's maybe showing signs of mental illness but isn't diagnosed? That's all in the database. What we find is when it comes to very serious and persistent mental illness, particularly psychosis, so hallucinations and delusions, it is overrepresented compared to the general population, but still a small minority of perpetrators. It's only about 10% of perpetrators where we can say these individuals were really being driven by psychosis. The rest of them, it's a much more complicated story.
Now, the majority of perpetrators do have some sort of mental health history. And of course, you can say they're not mentally healthy well individuals, but there's no kind of diagnosis that goes with this and you cannot say that any particular diagnosis leads to this. What we see is these complex histories, these stories that develop over time, this pathway to violence and for some, mental health is a piece of that; for some, it's not. I think, in many ways, we've oversimplified the question in our public discourse. It's either they're mentally ill or they're not. And my answer is, it's a really complicated and complex question. There's not a simple yes, no. But I think anytime we try to blame this on mental illness, we can't do that. We know that it's a lot more complicated.
Marshall Poe:
Right. And the reason I ask the question is because there's another intervention that would be possible. If we found that people with certain diagnosable mental illnesses were more likely to do this, we might put them under heightened scrutiny. An example I'm thinking is child abusers, they're under a lot of heightened scrutiny because they are, well, they're likely recidivists if they're not monitored. But in the case of your data, you don't show this. No heightened scrutiny for people with mental illnesses.
Jillian Peterson:
No, certainly not. I mean, I think we really focus on people who are in crisis, who are leaking plans about violence, who are actively suicidal, and that has no relationship with a specific diagnosis.
Marshall Poe:
Let's talk a little bit about the means by which they do this. Does it always involve guns or are there cases in which you found that there were other types of weapons involved?
Jillian Peterson:
We only track cases where the perpetrator used a gun.
Marshall Poe:
I see.
Jillian Peterson:
There are databases that track things like arson and stabbings. We are only focused on shootings.
Marshall Poe:
Were you able to find out where they got the guns?
Jillian Peterson:
We do. We ended up building an entire gun database, which is also publicly available, has every gun used in every mass shooting that we studied. It's four or 500 different guns. We tracked how they got them, when they got them, if they were modified, sort of anything that we could come up with. And the majority of perpetrators do purchase their guns legally with the exception of school shooters. School shooters are typically too young to buy guns because they're students of the school and they are taking them from parents and family members who don't have them safely secured. But generally, most perpetrators are doing legal purchases.
Marshall Poe:
And so here's another place where there might be an intervention in a different country, but not the United States.
Jillian Peterson:
I know.
Marshall Poe:
Not the United States.
Jillian Peterson:
Yes. Our data does point to some things that I think are gaining more universal support. So things like safe storage has pretty widespread support amongst both gun owners and non-gun owners and things like Red Flag laws for people who are in crisis, things like waiting periods, raising the minimum age, some of those things we are seeing some movement. I'm hopeful some movement is starting and our data would really support all of those things as a preventative measure.
Marshall Poe:
Were you able to draw any conclusions, and this is a little bit broader discussion, of how people get into this nihilistic state because it seems to me once you have decided to do this, you have already traveled a kind of road to what I can really only call nihilism. You think the world is a terrible place and you're going to go out in a display of horrible inhumanity.
Jillian Peterson:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
How do people get into this state? Because sometimes you'll see people say, "Well, the culture itself is producing people like this willy-nilly," and it's because of this, that, and the other thing. Do you have any insights there?
Jillian Peterson:
I mean we see in the early lives of perpetrators really significant early childhood trauma and I mean, really horrific things with physical abuse and sexual abuse or suicide of a parent. And of course, millions of people experience that would never do anything like this. But that does seem to be kind of the early foundation. And then this develops over time where these perpetrators are becoming kind of depressed and hopeless and isolated. And then there is this radicalization piece. I do think social media has accelerated this because it used to be if you were thinking this way, you would have to go find someone else in your school, your class, who was also thinking this way to validate you. Now you have access to the entire world and you can find these communities online that really do validate your thinking. And a lot of the family members we talked to would say, "He was very depressed, and when things shifted was when he found this online community that kind of emboldened him to do some of these things."
I think there's that piece of it too. And then of course, there's this whole, my co-author's a sociologist whereas I'm a psychologist, but there's this whole other level of American culture around this. And especially in the past four years where we saw the worst years on record for mass shootings where when Donald Trump was president and there was kind of a different level of hateful discourse in our public spaces. It's hard to kind of say, "This is the one thing that causes this or this is the exact pathway," but we do see these patterns.
Marshall Poe:
Right. Well, I agree completely with what you said about the internet. One of the wonderful things that the internet does is it enables to find people who have interests similar to ours. And I think this is a great benefit for society. I mean, the New Books Network itself is a kind of product of that. If you are interested in Indian religions or South Asian studies, monographs about South Asia, well, we have your people and that's great. That's just fantastic. I mean, I was a medieval Russian historian. How in the world am I going to find other people of medieval? But on the internet, I can.
Jillian Peterson:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
And that's wonderful. But on the other hand, there are these other ways in which this aggregation of interest occurs, which are more nefarious, and this is one of them. So this suggests a possible intervention. And again, I don't want to encourage these surveillance state, but aren't the authorities looking for message boards or Reddit threads or Facebook groups or, I don't know where this kind of neolism is talked about openly?
Jillian Peterson:
I think we are just on the brink of these conversations. In terms of, we have free speech and that you don't want necessarily people sort of policing all social media platforms and identifying potential school shooters. At the same time, I think there's questions about what is the responsibility of social media platforms when this type of extreme hateful rhetoric is occurring on their platforms. And I don't think we've figured that out yet. I'm curious to see where this conversation goes over the next few years in terms of whose responsibility is that? How extreme can it get? And when it turns into real-world violence, sort of how responsible and who's responsible? I think that's coming.
Marshall Poe:
I mean it is a big problem and we've only just started to talk about it. I think I can say with some confidence that freedom of speech and freedom of association are pretty much fundamental to being Americans.
Jillian Peterson:
Exactly.
Marshall Poe:
But that's kind of who we are.
Jillian Peterson:
It is.
Marshall Poe:
But in this case, there are some trade offs that might have to be made. Very painful trade offs.
Jillian Peterson:
I think part of it comes down to what do we do with those red flags? One thing we talk about in the book is our reaction to threats of violence has been very punitive. We come in with the police and we might arrest you for making terroristic threats. Or there's kids sitting in prison for 10 years because of something they posted on TikTok. I don't think that's a productive way to respond. Rather than saying when someone's posting this, when they're talking about this, this is a cry for help. This is a person that needs intervention and resources. How do we build systems that can reach out and say, "Hey, we're worried about you. How can we get you connected?"
Marshall Poe:
Well, I was going to say, I'm glad you mentioned resources because this is actually quite a good place to stop the interview with a discussion of, what should you do if you find somebody you know going through one of these noticeable crises? Whom should you contact? Are there resources available to say, "I'm really worried about Jane or John, I saw them doing something that was very abnormal and I feel like something needs to be done." Who do you contact?
Jillian Peterson:
I think that is actually what we're really missing because I've talked to mothers or perpetrators who will say, "I was worried about my kid but I wasn't going to call the police and say, I think my kid might be a school shooter," and the police aren't really the right people to intervene in that situation because no law has been broken. I think we really need to build these systems. I think we need to build them in schools, we need to build them in workplaces, we need to build them in community organizations, places where people can report if they're worried about somebody, not because that person is going to be fired or expelled or criminally charged instead, you would have sort of a team approach where people would look into it, they would investigate, they would reach out, and they would try to connect that person with resources.
We really don't have those systems and that's what we need. And they don't take necessarily some act of congress to build those. They do take resources within schools and workplaces and some training. But we're starting to see some school districts trying to build those teams that can really have that more holistic response where students, parents, teachers, they can report and go to when they're worried, knowing that there's going to be this kind of warmer, more holistic response.
Marshall Poe:
This also involves massive trade offs, and we happen to have a discussion about it because just as you say, you don't want the authorities in scare quotes, "coming down on somebody" simply because somebody contacted them saying John or Jane is acting weird.
Jillian Peterson:
Right. Absolutely not.
Marshall Poe:
That's bad. But on the other hand, in the percentage of cases where John and Jane really is acting weird and John and Jane may go shoot some place up, you definitely want some sort of approach that isn't calling the police. Because when you call the police, they come and as people who've seen the police in action, when you call the police, you lose complete control of the situation.
Jillian Peterson:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
They are in charge. You're not in charge anymore, and that can have its own harm.
Jillian Peterson:
It can, yes.
Marshall Poe:
It really can. I just am kind of struggling because it seems to me like a national hotline or something where is it kind of SWAT team of people who, like you and your co-author who just know everything about this, and then can sit down and discuss, "Well yes, we should have some sort of intervention that is sensitive to the context," would make sense.
Jillian Peterson:
The best model I've seen is run by Sandy Hook Promise. They have a crisis center where they have an anonymous app and it's used by about two million students, I think, across the country, where students can contact through this app if they're worried about either themselves or somebody else. It goes to crisis counselors who are there 24/7, who respond within one minute, and they start chatting with that student and try to figure out kind of what's going on. And sometimes that student just needs someone to talk to and kind of deescalate them. Sometimes, they do need to contact the police if it's very serious. Sometimes, it's just sort of contacting the school to say, "Hey, this person contacted, why don't you look into it?" But that type of model I would love to see expanded into all communities. Because it just seems like something we're in desperate need of right now.
Marshall Poe:
And this is something that you could study and actually build a database about because one of the ways in which our impressions of these things is skewed, or is that are skewed, is skewed, is that we only hear about these successful cases of mass shooting. We don't hear about the ones in which there was an intervention and that intervention successfully stopped the perpetrator from killing a bunch of people.
Jillian Peterson:
Yes, it's very true. I'm on the board of Sandy Hook Promise, and so I get to hear when there's been foiled school shootings and there's been at least a dozen very serious, very close calls that have been caught through this crisis center, but they're also catching kids who might commit suicide or self harm or other things. There's kind of this diffusion of benefits.
Marshall Poe:
Well, that sounds like a wonderful program and I hope that something can be done. I'm sure that you and your co-author and the people of Sandy Hook are doing it, it's good work for all of us. So I want to thank you for that.
Jillian Peterson:
Absolutely. And hopefully, people read the book and one thing we tried to do is come up with things that individuals can do, institutions can do, and things we can do at the broader society, but I think sometimes we get caught at the broader society level. It feels so frustrating. But we tried to come up with things that individuals could do themselves tomorrow that can be a part of this holistic violence prevention approach.
Marshall Poe:
Yes. I had forgotten to say this, but you've reminded me to say it. The Violence Project has a wonderful website. You should go there. In fact, I would recommend that you go to Google and type in The Violence Project Takeaways. The first return will show you a kind of summation of all the data and findings. And so of course, you should go by the book, which is called The Violence Project: How to Stop Mass Shooting Epidemic. But if you don't buy the book, go to The Violence Project website where you'll find Jill and James's data and you'll find the key takeaways that they determine in the results of their research. I very much recommend you do that. Jill, thank you very much for being on the show.
Jillian Peterson:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Marshall Poe:
Sure. Bye bye.
Jillian Peterson:
Bye.
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