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Crime & Motive

Posted Posted by DetectiveEstes in Detective Estes' Corner     Comments No comments

This article will discuss motive for crime in general.
In every media piece on any reported crime, the media immediately announces the police have no motive for the crime. So let me give one right now. Power. Here’s another: Immediate gratification. And one more: Contempt for the law. In a criminal’s mind the thought is – ‘I want it and I’m going to get it, no matter what the law is. Because I want it.’ Simple.
Notice the above has nothing to do with the victim. The victim has little to do with most crime. Criminals don’t think of victims as anything but a ‘thing’ to do.
During the mid-1980’s the speech by law enforcement then was motive & opportunity = crime. That can be shortened a now. Motive = crime. Opportunity is in the mind of the perpetrator.
In the 1980’s, crime was very bad. There was lots of crime. Perpetrators were going to jail for less and less time. Law enforcement was doing its job. The courts and subsequent court jobs (probation & parole) weren’t doing theirs. An example was, in Virginia if someone were sentenced to prison for 25 years, he/she may not be actually inside the jail but for 3 years! The 25 years would immediately be lowered by prisons by either 50% or 25% depending on how many times the suspect had been previously arrested. If the defendant managed to be sentenced then to serve 5 years or less, then he was incarcerated in a local jail. This meant that time was then halved so he may get out in 2 1/2 years after a sentence of 25 years! Small wonder then, that the recidivist rate was a national average of 97%. Truly a travesty to the victim. So victims were advised by law enforcement to try to do what they could do to not be victims. Except of course, hardly any potential victim was allowed to have a concealed weapon permit. Citizens had to prove a need to the chief of police or sheriff, to carry a weapon. Hardly any permits were passed.
Fast forward to the mid-90’s. The New York City Police Department and the Mayor, Giuliani, devised plans to clean up the city of its terrible crime. During this time, crime dropped over 50%. This plan used essentially two methods: 1) no crime, no matter how small, was allowed to happen without police enforcement. (2) Individual precinct supervisors were held responsible by the Chief of Police for the amount of crime in that area.
The next crime fighting trend that happened was that a number of conservatives were elected to governor and the state’s legislature for many states. Nearly all of these conservative governors and legislatures did two major things to severely decrease crime: 1) criminal defendants now had to serve 85% of their sentence for every felony. (2) the priviledge to carry a gun became a right.
Crime went down severely in every state that these two things happened in. In Virginia, Governor George Allen, in 1994 enacted the right to carry law as well as the 85% law. In one year, crime dropped by 50%! As other states enacted both these types of laws crime fell drastically. Amazing. These states didn’t become miniature Dodge City’s as predicted by the mainstream news media, but crime did fell to an all time low. The crime continued to lower as criminals languished in jail and died out, or simply got too old to do crime.
In the new millenium, however, crime began to rise again due to the influence of gangs. Now into the second decade of the 2000s, we see a rise in gang crime, crimes by illegal aliens, and ever more drug crimes. This is mainly due to the severe influx of illegal aliens entering the United States from Mexico and staying here. Without a stop-in customs checkpoint there is no way to stop the flow of illegal subjects entering the country, and therefore no way to know who is coming here, bad or good.
A very bad thing about criminal illegal aliens entering the country is there are no fingerprints taken of them to positively identify them. Immigrants entering the country with the intent to stay and become United States citizens have their fingerprints taken and identifying entries into a computer. This identifies these subjects if something bad happens to them. It’s also a positive ID for marriage purposes, and all sorts of other legal documents. It also identifies suspect who leave fingerprints at crime scenes immediately.
However, one good thing about most foreign criminals is they do not know the technology of the police in the U.S. Most foreign criminals see no benefit at all to covering their hands unless the weather is cold. Leaving fingerprints, or DNA, or taking obviously identifiable items or pawning these same items which immediately identifies them is a concept they haven’t considered in the past. Many never realize it throughout their crime career! Plus, after a few minutes of denial, and the slow realization that nobody is going to get tortured in a police interview, most foreign criminals will confess their deed to the police.
Sometimes I wonder if some motives for crime is so they can see their name on the news. In the murder of Cayle Anthony, and the subsequent trial of Casey Anthony, the little girl’s mother, the trial was the only news for a total of 31 days. During that time, no other news was published in both the mainstream media as well as cable media. Evidently President Obama’s doings were not more important than this trial as his name was not mentioned. He even went on TV a couple times and though the speech was shown, the coverage returned immediately to the trial or the review of the day. I believe if Iran had hit Israel with a nuclear strike the world may not have known about it if it depended on the 6 o’clock news. This is a powerful draw for those with such tremendous need for self gratification.
Power is the only motive criminals ever need. Many criminals talk about the ultimate power of watching someone die in front of them and how that is a draw for them to experience again and again. This power extends to every crime, no matter how small or large it is. This power is sexual as well. Many criminals cannot have sex normally but have no problems in sex type crimes or in masturbation during the commission of other crimes such as burglary.
When training recruits in the primary investigation of burglary crimes, I would advise them to look under bed covers, in underwear drawers, and other places where photos of women were, in search of semen, or defecation. Most people don’t think of defecation as possibly sexual, but defecating in a stranger’s house when the criminal knows the owner will find it first, is a definite power-trip.
In conclusion, those who read this remember that criminal’s motives are for one main reason: Power over the victim. So the next time some news media reporter says the police don’t have a motive for the crime….you remember that the police ALWAYS know the motive, and that motive is power.

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