Can Murder Be Tracked Like An Infectious Disease? not sure if this one meets SoP but, interesting --

[Tuesday Afternoon]

By Shankar Vedantam: Originally published on Thu December 6, 2012 5:12 am

If I asked you to think of a murderer, what's the image that springs to mind?

If you're like most people, you'll probably think of an evil psychopath, or someone bent on revenge. Perhaps you'll see a criminal mastermind, who eliminates rivals on his way to riches. Or a strung-out drug addict, who kills because she needs money to get high.

All of these images have something in common: As a rule, we tend to associate murder with the behavior of individuals who behave in aberrational ways.

"We think of individuals who commit homicide as being unlike the rest of us," said April Zeoli, a public health researcher at Michigan State University's School of Criminal Justice. "They are crazy, or substance users, or had a bad childhood. There is some reason specific to the individual that they are committing homicide."

Zeoli recently decided to test that theory using the lens of public health research: When scientists study the outbreak of an infectious disease like AIDS or the flu, they don't ask what it is about specific individuals that made them sick. They look for broader patterns, knowing that illness in any individual stems from a process of contagion.

Along with colleagues Jesenia M. Pizarro, Sue C. Grady and Christopher Melde, Zeoli asked whether homicide might follow the same principles of contagion.

more at link:
http://www.wfae.org/post/can-murder-be-tracked-infectious-disease

[peacebird]

1. Creepy idea...

[Tuesday Afternoon]

2. deep.

[graham4anything]

3. I could have a field day with this one. It would just be too easy.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

4. pray - do go On ---

Have At It, Maestro.

[graham4anything]

5. nah, It's the Christmas season, I'll let you guys off easy

[Tuesday Afternoon]

6. yeah, right. bless it.

[graham4anything]

7. I will answer it straight though

not going where I was alluding

but if they somehow had the ability to know precisly what it was that turned say Dick Cheney into Dick Cheney and somehow alter that

but one would need to know one of thousands of variables and what type of murderer one is talking about

too many different types of murder and killing add political motives, add crime of passion
add economic add accidental not meaning mob mentality not being able to stop
drugs
a spark
a bad day leading to worse
some random snap of a finger

even someone brainwashed
etc.

revenge

abuse

[Tuesday Afternoon]

8. those issues are covered within the first four paragraphs. To wit:

"We think of individuals who commit homicide as being unlike the rest of us," said April Zeoli, a public health researcher at Michigan State University's School of Criminal Justice. "They are crazy, or substance users, or had a bad childhood. There is some reason specific to the individual that they are committing homicide."

Zeoli recently decided to test that theory using the lens of public health research: When scientists study the outbreak of an infectious disease like AIDS or the flu, they don't ask what it is about specific individuals that made them sick. They look for broader patterns, knowing that illness in any individual stems from a process of contagion.

[graham4anything]

11. but that makes it individual,

so the only answer indeed would be to take out that which would enable someone to murder someone to not have it happen in any form anyway any how

(except for a crime of passion which is unavoidable if the two people are in the same place and no one unrelated not directly involved or invested in that specific occasion is around them)

[friendly_iconoclast]

21. "would be to take out that which would enable someone to murder someone"

Well then, we'll just have to ban:
Hands
Feet
Rocks
Pointy sticks
Clubs
Knives
Guns
Rope
Poison
Swords
Archery
Martial Arts
Metallurgy
Chemistry

Looks like quite the list- better get busy!

[TPaine7]

14. Thanks, my sides are still hurting from the last time you took us to task. Merry Christmas! n/t

[Tuesday Afternoon]

32. and not from a kidney punch, either.

[GreenStormCloud]

9. The islands of resistance are especially interesting to me. N/T

[Tuesday Afternoon]

13. yes, something correct and strong and good is happening and needs to be spread to the other areas.

[TPaine7]

16. Exactly.

I'm interested too. That is an area where genuine scientific inquiry could be conducted and useful information gained.

My guess is that there are cultural differences, and that those cultural differences may lead to less guns being around in the islands of resistance (because non-violent gun culture is not part of the local reality).

The researchers will, of course, leap to the conclusion that guns are the driver instead of the driven factor. Their "results" will then simply be a vehicle to drive their preexisting agenda.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

18. TPaine7, I find this comment to be prejudicial -

The researchers will, of course, leap to the conclusion that guns are the driver instead of the driven factor. Their "results" will then simply be a vehicle to drive their preexisting agenda.

You are predicting an outcome based on a prejudice, me thinks.

[TPaine7]

24. Read the OP's cited source.

"We hypothesized that the distribution of this crime was not random, but that it moved in a process similar to an infectious disease, with firearms and gangs operating as the infectious agents," the researchers wrote in a paper they published in the journal Justice Quarterly.

They have already leapt to the conclusion that guns are the driver. How is it prejudicial to suppose that they will continue doing what they have already done?

[Tuesday Afternoon]

25. that is the purpose of a hypothesis, is it not? To make one and then prove it wrong until it can no

longer be proven wrong . . .

[TPaine7]

26. Some hypotheses are so outlandish that they show bias in themselves.

If you hypothesized that proximity to black men caused white women to be raped, I would assume that you were biased.

Now if you you said that proximity of white women to a certain subset of black men in certain circumstances causes them to be raped, I would say that you had a legitimate hypothesis.

By ignoring culture, knowledge, socioeconomic status, and other factors and making the naked hypothesis that guns operate as infectious agents to spread murder, these researchers make a similar error.

Of course guns, in the wrong circumstances, facilitate the increase of murder. But guns were once carried to school by children on public transport, according to some posters on this site. They were used in school classes and in sporting events.

If guns functioned as infectious agents to spread murder, this would not be possible. The real driver is obviously culture. The obvious driver in the rape of white women is the character (or lack thereof) of the men around them.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

27. so then, how do you propose a hypothesis for the parameters in this module?

[TPaine7]

28. That only requires a quick edit.

"We hypothesized that the distribution of this crime was not random, but that it moved in a process similar to an infectious disease, with gangs operating as the infectious agents," the researchers wrote in a paper they published in the journal Justice Quarterly.

That is a rational hypothesis. The issue is not guns but gangs, and to a lesser extent, guns in the presence of gangs.

If guns were magically removed from the world and prevented from being made, there would still be murder. It would decline, I agree, but there was more murder, IIRC, in middle ages Europe than in modern America. It's culture.

Now if gangs miraculously ceased to exist, murder would plummet. If criminals were kept from guns by more effective law enforcement and gangs disappeared, our murder rate would be minuscule.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

29. possibly but, gang related murders are not the only murders out there. Domestic Violence, Homicide,

Suicide (yes.) etc.... Should they not also be considered?

[TPaine7]

30. Domestic violence already disqualifies people for gun possession; we should

simply enforce existing law.

As for suicides, that's trickier. I don't see how constitutional laws can stop most suicides. As for ordinary murder with guns, most murderers have long rap sheets and are already disqualified from owning weapons. As for the extraordinary ones--the intelligent, hell bent ones who plot and plan and scheme mass murder--they cannot be stopped without a police state, and perhaps not even by that. And they don't need guns, either.

Personally, I prefer the slight chance of a mass murderer taking me out to a police state.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

31. I don't think these people are studying the issue in order to make more laws. I think they are

trying to show trends and how to avoid this one.

[TPaine7]

33. I do. Their outlandish hypothesis shows, IMO, an agenda,

just like the other hypothesis I used as an analogy shows an agenda.

I don't think they just want to convince other academics that guns are bad and cause murders like germs cause disease. They want to influence legislatures, courts, governors and presidents as well as public opinion. And only laws can ensure that their policy recommendations are followed--unless of course they plan to PERSUADE Americans to give up their murder causing infectious agents.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

34. only time will tell --

I with hold judgement until I see some action of that nature from this group.

[TPaine7]

35. You're not necessarily going to see them "act," depending on what you mean by that.

A person or organization can have a goal of changing public opinion and getting laws changed and pursue those objectives without ever acting overtly in that direction by, say, testifying in Congress or acting in an explicitly political way.

For example, if a scholar had a hypothesis that eating spinach was causing deaths of children, she could pursue the objective of making it illegal to feed kids spinach without ever doing anything besides academics. The activists would arise if the propaganda was successful, and the politicians would fall in line if it was "scientifically" established that spinach killed children.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

36. of course, the results will be in the pudding. This Group is a long way from that, I think.

[TPaine7]

10. Guns as infectious agents is just silly; gangs spreading gang culture is a much better analogy.

I noticed that the article listed guns first, as if exposure to guns is more of a factor than exposure to gang culture. That alone shows the mentality at work.

"We hypothesized that the distribution of this crime was not random, but that it moved in a process similar to an infectious disease, with firearms and gangs operating as the infectious agents," the researchers wrote in a paper they published in the journal Justice Quarterly.

On its face, that seems insane. Guns are not analogous to infectious agents.

Being around guns and even accepting gun culture does not lead to murder; being around gangs and accepting gang culture does lead to crime, including murder.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

12. and I think that is why this article does not meet the SoP ... murder is not necessarily by Gun.

[TPaine7]

15. To be fair, I think the post meets the SoP since the article is categorically blaming murder on guns

It's just bat-feces insane to imply, as the "scholars" do, that one's proximity to guns categorically drives murder--including for example, knife murders, poisonings and strangulations.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

17. corealation is not causation -- but, these guys are thinking outside the box and are looking for

solutions and I applaud them for trying to look at this from a new and different angle.

[graham4anything]

19. What is a gang? I assume you mean two Ivy League schools with senior chess teams

Are we talking about two rival schools who each have a chess club?
Will a simple Checkmate lead to the entire two teams taking to the street and firing their guns, which all of them had, provided by their well off parents giivng all of them a gold chess set and a gun on their 13th birthday

So the day of the big match and the timers are out and the game moves on
when all of a sudden one side cheats

And the two Ivy League school chess team stand up in unison, reach in their pocket and take out their guns fully loaded

of course the pawns will be the first to get hit
Followed by a systematic removal of each player in the same importance of order as the game itself
And of course, the King will remain standing and be well protected by the Queen(who will be sacrificed way before the King falls.


I mean 100% of a gang can have a gun
take out the gun, and 0% of that gang would have a gun
If 100% of the gang members have a gun and meet another gang who also have a gun
10 out of 10 times you will have someone fire the gun

checkmate.
except that everyone is a loser in that and no winner. Last man standing is arrested and in the state this was played in, has the death penalty, and with Elton John singing in the background "the King must die"

[img]9[/img]

I told you this was way too easy.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

20. cool story, bro.

[petronius]

22. Interesting, but it seems like the most difficult bit is still ahead of them

I haven't read the actual research paper, but it seems like what they're ultimately getting at is to try and identify the neighborhood characteristics that correlate to high homicide rates - maybe things like employment, age distribution, household income, rent/own ratio, other crime rates - and try to model how these things interact to produce changing neighborhood characteristics over time. Also, how changing crime rates feed back to modify these characteristics.

After that, if they want to predict future diffusion, they have to figure out how these various characteristics in one neighborhood affect the same variables in adjacent neighborhoods, and which ones have the biggest impact, in order to forecast which new neighborhoods might transition toward 'high crime' (and how quickly).

It sounds like an interesting mapping project, but since crime rates are influenced by so many variables, and I assume less deterministically than disease, I'm not sure how useful it will be in terms of allocating anti-crime resources. For that, I'd imagine that a more short term 'target the hot spots' approach would have the bigger impact. Although if they do identify and quantify specific characteristics that make a place more or less vulnerable to crime, those could be attempted to be alleviated everywhere. Especially if they find something previously un-thought-of.

Actually, this analysis seems more useful for real estate investors - trying to figure out which areas will be lucrative 10-20 years down the road...

[Tuesday Afternoon]

23. Bingo on that last statement. Real Estate - one of my favorite subjects and predicting

the trend ahead of the curve is valuable.