Is it just me or are there fewer serial killers these days?
Maybe. OTOH, the decline in identified serial killers tracks with the decline in identifying the perpetrators of killings period, as the clearance rate for homicides has dropped. Plenty of room for serial killers to hide in that:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/are-ser...
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-explains-...
Also: video games. Young men, who commit most of the murders, spend more time playing video games and therefore less time murdering.
But it also matters what we mean by "solved" too.
Most of the (solved) crime news I read about, I'm always confounded how unaware criminals are about "tradecraft".
For an example of stupid criminals, I remember reading in the local newspaper about a group of guys that had robbed a store of phone cards (the story is a bit old) and tried to sell them back to said store.
Instead of using a public phone with one of those cards, they just used their own mobile phone to contact the store. Since in France you're required to give ID to get a SIM card, I'll let you guess how long it took the police to find the robbers :)
Most burglaries and robberies are performed close to where the criminal lives. They are mostly opportunistic crimes done criminals with no thought at the time of what they are doing and no fear of the consequences.
The stereotypical version of that is the drug addict doing anything to get money for their fix, but generally it's associated with not very smart people who do stuff and do not fear the consequences.
https://www.20minutes.fr/insolite/2359379-20181023-belgique-...
I do remember seeing the luka magnotta documentary on netflix (don't fuck with cats), which while not quite a serial killers, comes close to someone who liked the attention.
Yet the Chicago Strangler [1], who is still active, still operating to this day, 50+ victims, few have heard of....because he attacks marginalized groups like black runaways rather than white people.
But even if he's not as well known as Zodiac, again, look at the victim profile: runaways and sex workers. It's not just about skin color, although for some reason both of you zeroed in on that. I specified "marginalized groups" such as [mostly black] runaways. It's about being poor, unknown, and not white.
Your implication is that white people can't be marginalized. Economics cut across skin color.
So, which is it?
The common thread seems to be economic status as another commenter stated.
That strongly implies that a white person couldn't be marginalized.
Directly contrasting a specific "non-white marginalized group" with "all white people" does, for me, evoke the impression as if the assumption was that there were no people among "white people" that could be marginalized the same way.
> He only said that that serial killer targets black runaways, and that that is a marginalized group.
This is the part of the comment I was replying to that I took issue with and felt I had to rebut, because it's simply a false summary. The original comment definitely was a stronger statement than that through the broad comparison it drew.
If the original post had been phrased "... rather than white middle class people" (which I believe was the intention), I would completely agree with it.
But Zodiac is killing couples he doesn't know at a distance with a gun (or a knife, likely because a gunshot would draw too much attention). He wants to be notorious but not personally notorious? He just has a hate on for anonymous couples? Are there (m)any more examples of this kind of killer? Hypothetically, if he could kill say a hundred couples from a distance with a bomb would that motivate him? I'm just not getting it.
We do have far more mass shootings though :(
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...
Many people don't realize that the US is at some of the lowest gun violence levels seen in decades right now. The 90s were way, way worse.
The reason people are unaware of this is that organized crime is really only visible when they are having problems. Gang wars lead to news coverage, one gang monopolizing an area and effectively extracting revenue from it does not.
Growing up in the 90s, witnessing 9/11 and the ensuing cultural “snap back,” I think both of you are right. I think what we really had going on before 9/11 was that the country had a very cavalier, devil may care attitude. For some sections of society, that enabled a more carefree lifestyle; for others, we literally didn’t care if they destroyed each other. I think that devil may care attitude disappeared after 9/11 and especially during the ensuing wars.
Where we’re at culturally now would probably require an entire essay to explain. I do think an argument could be made that something similar happened in the late 2000s and early 2010s, where one segment of society let its hair down and was able to exhale, while a totally different class of people were marginalized.
We’re at or near another cultural “snap back” now, I think. What that’ll look like, I have no idea.
If it was “better policing”, you expect the clearance rate for actual homicides to have gone up as well as the identified serial killers to have gone down. Instead, the clearance rate has gone down, as well. “Worse policing” of murder would better explain both reduced clearance of homicides and reduced numbers of identified serial killers.
Who knows how many murders were incorrectly pinned on husbands or wives, or known petty criminals, or tramps? The same technology we use to find murderers can also exonerate people.
We also tossed out a lot of bogus methods based on pseudo-science and learned a lot about the reliability of witnesses; and all the modern technology exposed many expert witnesses as charlatans.
It does kind of look like it.
https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/bank-crime-statistics-20...
I interviewed a family friend who had then recently retired from chasing bank robbers in the FBI for a school project a decade and change ago. The biggest take-a-way was his assertion that, at least at that time, anyone could get away with robbing a bank once. It's not getting away with the crime itself that's hard: it's not leaving a pattern on the next one.
Bored people are unpredictable.