Inside the Criminal Mind

 by Thomas Kies

 On Friday, February 27th, I’ll be joining a panel at Left Coast Crime with Harriet Cannon, Craig Clevenger, and David Putnam, moderated by Laurie Stevens. Our topic-- “Getting Inside the Criminal Mind”--sounds like fun. If you’re going to write crime fiction, you’ve got to have that motive. So, in preparation for the discussion, I began listing the forces that might drive a person to break the law.

The most obvious motivations are greed, jealousy, rage, hubris, and desperation. There are more, like revenge and compulsion, but for this blog, I’m just going to talk about the five I listed. 

Greed and jealousy are siblings. Both come from desire--specifically, the desire for what someone else possesses. It might be money, a car, status, fame, professional recognition, or a romantic partner. Greed whines, “I want more.” Jealousy growls, “I want what you have.” In either case, the criminal act becomes a shortcut, a way to acquire something unattainable--or perceived as unattainable--through legitimate means. Many white-collar crimes, embezzlements, and even murders for inheritance are a result of greed.  Many “crimes of passion” are rooted in jealousy.

Rage, on the other hand, often erupts without careful planning. It simmers beneath the surface until one provocation too many causes it to boil over. A barroom insult, a heated argument, a moment of humiliation, or even being cut off on the highway can ignite it. Crimes of rage are frequently impulsive. They are not the product of elaborate schemes but of emotional explosions. In such cases, the perpetrator may not have intended to commit a crime when the day began. The act is born in a flash of anger—and the consequences last far longer.

Hubris is another powerful motivator. This is the belief that one is smarter than everyone else, immune to consequences, or entitled to bend the rules. Some criminals are driven less by need than by arrogance. They believe they can outwit the system, manipulate the evidence, or charm their way out of suspicion. For others, the appeal lies in the thrill itself—the adrenaline rush of taking risks and defying authority. Hubris whispers, “You won’t get caught.” For some, that challenge is irresistible.

Desperation sets the stage for a more complicated moral landscape. When options begin to disappear and survival feels at stake, people may justify actions they would otherwise condemn. If your family is starving and you have no money, would you steal food to keep them alive? Many crimes arise not from ambition or arrogance but from fear and scarcity. Desperation narrows perspective. It transforms illegal acts into perceived necessities.

Of course, human motivation is rarely singular. Greed can mingle with hubris. Rage can be fueled by jealousy. Desperation can coexist with resentment. Real-life crimes—and the most compelling fictional ones—often stem from a volatile mixture of emotions and circumstances.

Mix in a few additives like drug use or revenge and you can have a deadly cocktail of motives. 

And then there is the uncomfortable reality that some individuals act without empathy or remorse. While I am not a psychologist, it’s clear that certain offenders display traits associated with sociopathy or an absence of moral restraint. Whether we label that “evil” or understand it through clinical terms, it reminds us that not every crime fits neatly into a rational framework.

Getting inside the criminal mind means recognizing that, at its core, crime begins with motive. And motive, however dark, is almost always human. And interestingly, often, when a criminal acts, they don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing but more as an imperative.  Something that needs to be done. 

I want them all. I want the...

 Earlier this week, I hosted a guys' night at a local theater to watch on the big screen, the 70s classic, The Warriors.

Though I've heard of the movie, I'd never seen it before. In many ways, it didn't disappoint, being the cheesy, low-budget popcorn thriller people talked about. Plenty of contrived moments, like when the gang members are on the run for their lives, yet they stop to pick up girls. Teenage hormones, I suppose. What the movie did capture was the decrepit urban of landscape of New York City at the time, where the Big Apple seemed poised on the brink of collapse. I was there in the early 70s and vividly remember the squalor, the desolation, and the fear of imminent violence. Times Square was a cesspool of humanity. Boarding the subways--covered in graffiti inside and out--was like tempting fate, even in the middle of the day. I saw people attacked on the subway, kept out of the way during spontaneous brawls in McDonalds, witnessed muggings on Park Avenue and 42nd. It was a mess.

When I heard that the city had cleaned up, I returned in 1999 for a family vacation. The change for the better was shocking. It seemed futile trying to explain how bad things had been. My sons though, were expecting to find bodies floating in the East River.  One son even remarked, "This is New York? People are so friendly."

That was then, and NYC, like too many other big cities, Denver included, is staggering under rampant homelessness, drug trafficking, overdose deaths, and violent crime. Doesn't make for comfortable living but is fodder for good stories.

Back to the 70s

A few years back, I was at a board meeting of the Mystery Writers of America. After the big dinner (with an open bar), several of us had gone to Times Square to continue the festivities. At about two in the morning we piled into a taxi for the ride back to the Roosevelt Hotel. Along the way we spotted a single young woman strolling along 47th Street. She going somewhere that was none of our business but her relaxed attitude and that she was alone astounded us. We were a bunch of old timers who remembered New York City from the 70s and 80s, the Death Wish years. Back in the day, as young men, we would not have ventured going out even as a group at this time of night without risking injury or death. This woman's blasé manner showed how much the city had changed, for the better.

More recently, my sister took a job in Manhattan and during a visit to see her, I noted how much things had improved since I was first there. When I told her about the crime, the graffiti, the squalor, the decay, the homeless and prostitutes, that you could stand on any street corner and within ten minutes, witness a theft or mugging, she looked at me like I was talking about Bigfoot or UFOs. She pointed to a spray painted mural. "You mean graffiti like that?" Not even close.

I was convinced that the Big Apple would inevitably collapse like a rotting piece of fruit. But New Yorkers loved their city too much to let it deteriorate into complete ruin and through decades of hard work and persistence, swept away the crime and cleaned the place up. No small feat as with over two thousand murders per year, New York City had the reputation of being the most dangerous city in America. At times, its streets tallied a higher body count than Beirut, which was in the middle of a civil war!

By 2018, New York City was deemed the safest big city in America. True, Manhattan resembled a theme park for the rich but you could've trekked out at any hour and not feel like you should've prepared a toe tag in advance.

Now within days, New York City, like a lot of other urban centers, Denver included, seemed to have been flipped upside down. Riots. Vandalism. Mob rule. A rash of violent crime. Homeless camps that stretch for blocks. Boarded up windows where vibrant stores used to be. Decades of progress, BAM! wiped out. And a pandemic on top of all that. It looks like we're back to where we were forty years ago and everyone's forgotten the tough lessons that made our cities worth living in.

Will crime fiction lose its wheels?

One of the staples of crime and crime fiction may soon disappear. I'm talking about the get-away car.

To explain, the tech prognosticators are predicting that soon—within ten years, maybe five—the private car as we know it will be as obsolete as the horse-drawn buggy. According to this vision of tomorrow, to get around, instead of firing up the family jalopy, we'll summon a robotic Uber/Lyft that will whisk us to our destination. The traffic grid will be a commuters' paradise.

So how does crime figure into this? A common argument to fight "gun-violence" is that we ought to register guns like we do cars, ignoring the reality that registered cars are used to commit violent crimes all the time. Try kidnapping someone without a car (or other vehicle). In fact, getting kidnapped by car occurs so frequently that we even have slang for it: getting trunked. Cars are a favorite venue in which pedophiles sexually assault children. Cars are the most convenient and popular way to transport drugs for drug trafficking, which is a major source of violent crime. And cars are used in drive-by shootings and as get-away vehicles in robbery and homicide. If you were the chauffeur during those crimes, you can't excuse yourself by saying, "I was just the driver." Someone dies, you're on the hook as an accessory for murder one.

So how will violent crime happen in this future landscape of robotic cars? Consider that you won't own those cars; you'll sign up for a service that will keep your ID and credit card on file. There will be an extensive record of where and when you were in the car. So much for phony alibis. Plus, the car's wifi (or whatever) will shift through your cell phone and data-mine its contents. That feature is what will make this robo-car service affordable; you'll be a captive font of personal information. Besides that, the car will use facial recognition and other scanners to identify your passengers, and should any of them start using their phones in the car, they'll be data-mined as well. Plus, RF chips in your bottle of meds, your clothing, your purse and wallet, would also be scanned. Everything you do and bring into the car will be documented and analyzed. Additionally, these cars will be used for gun control since their interior scanners could identify guns and under the robotic car company terms-of-service, you would be prohibited from transporting even legally owned firearms without agreeing to onerous restrictions.

So in that scenario, how could you pull off a heist or a hit? Certainly there will be a premium service to ensure that the affairs of the rich remain private, and people up to no good will use that option. Hackers will no doubt mercilessly torment the robotic car industry. Factor in government corruption and bureaucratic incompetence, and criminals will exploit the security gaps using methods we can't yet imagine. So my prediction? Future crime writers will have plenty of juicy, horrific stories with no shortage of ways to vamoose the scene of the crime.

On another front, Blood Business, the newest crime anthology from Hex Publishers, edited by Josh Viola and me, was a Denver Post #1 bestseller.

Our future jobs

First off, my newest book, University of Doom, is out. I blogged about it last month so you can read about it there.

Lately, what's really gotten me wound up is talk about a Universal Basic Income. What drives this idea is that advances in Artificial Intelligence and automation are going to push a lot of people out of a job with no work to turn to. The most popular guess is that by 2030, robots will have replaced fifty percent of all jobs. Self-driving cars are about five years away, and the first two industries to be hit hard by them are taxis (to include Uber and Lyft) and commercial trucking. In the US, we have around 3.5 million commercial truck drivers, and there's plenty of speculation about how many of them will lose their jobs to automation. In the Wolverine movie, Logan, there's a scene where robotic trucks make a cameo appearance. It's a quick look, but telling in how no one in the movie remarks about them. Plus, we have to account for the ripple affect as the elimination of those drivers will impact truck stops, diners, repair facilities, and the industry's administrative overhead.

Elon Musk is among those giving the most dire of warnings. The problem is, without jobs, what will people do for money? Representative Chris Lee of Hawaii has proposed discussing the state issuing a Universal Basic Income, but as the idea is still in its infancy, the details are yet to be sorted out. As in who gets it? How much will it be? Where does the money come from?

Which got me thinking about the world of the future as we see in it in science fiction. We seldom see people in regular jobs. We have cops, guards, soldiers, the IT geeks, assorted pilots and crew, scientists, and those people at the top calling the shots. Once in a while we might see a clerk (though according to the futurists, those jobs will be among the first to go). And what about us writers? Will we be replaced by robots? The publishing industry would love that. (I call dibs on that story idea.)

This is obviously a huge topic and one I'll return to in the future. What I'm most curious about is crime in the future. Because of technology, fraud and theft have become more widespread. Our dependence on evermore prevalent narcotics is a major factor in violent crime, and the sex-slavery trade is as prolific as ever. So it seems, we crime writers will not lack for inspiration.

Real Murder

Our name is Type M for Murder and so I decided to tackle murder for real. This last week, the U.S. had another mass-murder, nine shot dead at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC. As a gun owner, on hearing the tragic news, I hung my head, both in condolences for the dead and their survivors, and to tell myself, here we go again. The American gun-control shouting match immediately heated to white-hot rhetoric before veering into an argument about racism and the Confederate battle flag.

Though many claim gun ownership in the U.S. is defined by political lines, it's not. I've got strong leftist sentiments and own guns, and I know plenty of liberals who stock quite an arsenal. And I know conservatives who have never fired a gun and don't care to. When I'm among gun aficionados, politics is rarely discussed.

The numbers I'm offering below are drawn from the most verifiable statistics available to me such as the FBI crime tables, GunPolicy.org, and others. The comparisons won't be exact but hopefully will paint an accurate enough picture. And any numbers I use will certainly incite trolls of all political stripes.

There's no doubt the U.S. is seen as a violent country. In 2014 we had 12,253 murders, of which 8,454 were committed with firearms. If we take the difference, 3,799, that homicide total still places us at the top of the murder list of Western-developed countries. But not so fast...if we include violent crime that didn't end up with bodies Dead Right There, then England and France are more dangerous than the U.S. What complicates any fact checking is that countries have different definitions of "violent" crime.

To the anti-gun crowd, the answer is quite obvious. Ban all guns, and gun-related crimes (and deaths) will go away. But it's not so simple. First of all, the U.S. is the only country where private ownership of guns is specified by law: the Second Amendment. And, almost all countries do allow private gun ownership in some degree (even Australia, which is often mistakenly touted as gun-free). Two countries that don't allow any private gun ownership are China and North Korea, and I don't think we want them as our model for civil rights.

The U.S. leads the world both in rate of gun ownership and numbers of guns. We have about one gun per person, and so the guns number about 300 million. At number two in rate of private gun ownership is Switzerland at 45.7 per 100 people. Number 3? Finland, 45.3 per 100. Who is second in number of guns? India! With 40 million in private hands.

So if lots of guns equals lots of gun deaths, then Switzerland, Finland, and India should be awash in bullet-riddled bodies, but they're not. Based on that, the argument can be made that strict licensing is what reins in gun-related deaths. However you have the example of Brazil, with 8.6 guns per 100, which translates to about 17 million guns (lots of people in Brazil). Owning a gun and ammunition in Brazil requires a license, with a criminal, mental, and employment background check, and that license must be renewed every three years. But given these controls, the Brazilian homicide rate, to include gun-related, dwarfs that of the U.S. Brazil in 2010 (most recent numbers): 43,272 total homicide; 36,153 gun-related. U.S. in 2010: 16, 259 total; 11,078 gun-related. Plus, in the U.S. as the number of guns is going up, both the numbers and rate of homicide is on the decline. So something else is prompting murder besides the availability of guns. Like poverty. Income disparities. Lack of opportunities.

But if we move to episodes of mass-murder, then what's at work is something more problematic than what motivates other violent crime. It's a failure of the spirit, it's a surrender to nihilism, it's dissociation from society. It's what drives some people to suicide and on that subject is where we can find tools to help address these problems. The recent mass-murders occurred in circumstances similar to what Viktor Frankl discussed in his monumental book, Man's Search for Meaning. He pointed out the irony of an increase in suicide in developed countries despite greater prosperity and material comfort. Killers driven to mass-murder clearly have mental/emotional issues, and here the failure lies with family and acquaintances who didn't step in. Easier said than done. In our family we had a murder-suicide, and the tragedy blindsided us. What could we have done to prevent this heartache and bloodshed? In hindsight, plenty. But looking forward, nothing suspicious or dangerous presented itself.

To stop these mass-murders, we have the responsibility of educating ourselves, of looking out for one another, of reaching out. Of asking questions, showing concern, and acting.