Clusters of violence, like the one seen in movie theaters in Aurora, Colorado, Lafayette, Louisiana, and most recently Antioch, Tennessee, are common when a traumatic event ripples through the media.
But do these similarities mean that the perpetrator is a copycat, mimicking the crimes of others?
Experts say yes – probably. But not because the perpetrator wouldn’t have committed some sort of crime of violence regardless.
“It gets really complicated,” said Jacqueline Helfgott, chair of the criminal justice department at Seattle University, in Washington. She recently published a literature review surveying studies on such behavior in the journal of Aggression and Violent Behavior.
“Just to understand the whole phenomenon requires pulling together articles from a lot of different sources, so most of what we know about copycat crime is from anecdotal accounts [and] news media reporting,” she said. The field is also short on empirical studies, Helfgott said. One of the best data-driven studies on the topic asked juvenile delinquents to self-report copycat crimes.
On Wednesday, public fears were stirred again when what police believed was a gunman entered the Carmike Hickory 8 in Antioch, a town southeast of downtown Nashville.
The man, Vincente David Montano, 29, entered the theater during a showing of Mad Max: Fury Road with a pellet gun, two backpacks, a hatchet, canisters of pepper spray and a propane tank. Just after 1pm, as the movie began, he doused two women in pepper spray, who ran out of the theater and told a nearby police officer about the attack.
After several rounds of telling Montano to surrender (police believed he had fired at them with a firearm at the time), he was shot and killed by a Nashville Swat team after throwing his pellet gun out the back door of the movie theater. Montano died there. He would later be described as a “transient” by Nashville police, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who had been committed to institutions at least four times and didn’t appear to have any address beyond a local homeless shelter.
Drawing a direct line between Montano and other movie theater attackers in the recent news, such as a shooter who killed two people in Lafayette, or the Aurora, Colorado, shooter who is now being sentenced, is dodgy at best.
Often, little can tie the suspects together besides their gender (the behavior is almost exclusively male) and relative isolation.
“In my mind there’s a lot of people sitting on the edge, ready to commit a crime or not,” Helfgott said. “What they need is some sort of validation to push them one way or the other.”
And whether those individuals are commonly finding that validation through traditional news media, or through the masterless depths of the internet, is unknown.
“I don’t see the media as a – certainly not as a primary – [maybe] a secondary cause of these events,” said Ray Surette, a researcher at the University of Central Florida who has studied copycat crimes for decades.
“I can probably pretty confidently say you wouldn’t have the number of theater shooting that have occurred, but it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have the same number of violent events – they may pick up a gun and head to McDonald’s,” said Surette.
It also bears repeating that while these events appear to be accelerating, researchers say they are rare and difficult to predict.
Where researchers have drawn widely accepted conclusions about this so-called copycat phenomenon, known as “contagion” in academic circles, is in studies of suicide, especially of teenagers.
The association is so well known that one of the field’s leading experts Madelyn Gould, professor of epidemiology in psychology at Columbia University, wrote almost 10 years ago that, “The existence of suicide contagion no longer needs to be questioned.”
Still, the campaign to stop reporting deaths as suicides is slow-going. Only this year the Associated Press, America’s largest news wire service, advised against identifying deaths as suicides, with some exceptions for prominent cases. (It is this newspaper’s policy not to use such suicide terminology because of the risk of encouraging others.)
For now, as researchers attempt to decipher the links or elements of a story that might contribute to such contagion, many have advised outlets against naming suspects.
“If there’s a corrective step to take, it’s to de-celebritize the coverage – the post-event coverage – minimize photos, minimize statements, and really minimize after the first couple stories reference to the individual,” said Surette. “I think you can cover these events perfectly well without repeatedly putting these people in front of the public and potential copycats as a model to follow.”
