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Comment by Crazyontap | Hacker News Reader

I really like New Zealand's policy(1) to not name the killers and not giving them any validation at all.

While the puzzle has been solved and it turned out to be real mind bender, it may be the end result that that killer may have wanted all along.

There is so much buzz around it (movie, subreddits, forums, and whatnot) that it really bums me out that we gave such a heinous criminal so much time and attention.

(1) "He sought many things from his act of terror, but one was notoriety - that is why you will never hear me mention his name," Ms Ardern said in an emotional address at New Zealand's parliament.

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So much this.

I find it infuriating how after every mass shooting in the US, the US media (at least the few US papers I tend to follow/read) scramble to get out info about the shooter, with pictures, names and background-stories. Why give such a person a platform? I do realize that it generates clicks and people love to soak up that kind of stuff, but it feels terribly wrong on so many levels.

Here in Brazil we had an incident years ago about this. Forgive any inaccuracies, it's been a while.

A man was called in by his girlfriend to her house, who she broke up with. He then pulled out a gun and held her and her best friend hostage for days at gunpoint. Police was called in, of course, and they spent days trying to negotiate with him so he'd let them in.

Of course, this is all the media talked about while it happened. One show host specifically, called Sonia Abrão, somehow managed to call the guy ON LIVE TELEVISION and had the most casual conversation ever, trying to get him to turn himself in.

Some time later, he let her friend go and police decided to raid the place. Only the friend survived.

This resulted in a documentary called Quem Matou Eloá? (Who Killed Eloá?) where her family and feminist figures talk about how her death was more than just a jealous boyfriend, and the media had a significant part of the guilt.

> scramble to get out info about the shooter, with pictures, names and background-stories

They are looking for someone who says it was nice guy and how shocking it all was. Usually some neighbour whose "hello" was answered by "hi". If he is young, he was definitely bullied.

Then, few months later if you follow it, it turns out the killed was causing issues last multiple years, had history of domestic violence and abuse, restraining order against him, beaten up few people and his own friends actually say "he was rough around the edges". Oh yeah, and what was called bullying was actually kids in school avoiding him, cause he was insulting them, stealing their stuff and beating them.

I watched CNN for about 20 minutes yesterday morning and they were talking about the shooting at the grocery store. To their credit, they only said his name once in that time. They referred to him only as "the shooter".

Likely only bc he wasn't white. Atlanta shooter's photos were plastered everywhere.

Maybe but I've seen plenty of mass shooter events where they were happy to mention a white shooters name regularly. I'm not sure mentioning a shooters name or not is inherently tied to race. How they describe it and such, I can believe that, but the name, not sure it is that specific.

That's my point? Unless there was a typo in your response? In this case, the shooter's name has a very distinct cultural connotation attached to it that would indicate non-whiteness.

I'm not even white, but it seems to me that there is a very concerted effort by the media in the United States to push a race angle on everything, with whiteness being specifically stigmatized.

Yeah I must have misunderstood.

> Why give such a person a platform?

It did lead to the Unabomber's arrest. But in that case of course the newspapers only published the manifesto at the request of the FBI.

I spent four years working in the only building that the Unabomber bombed twice (Cory Hall at the University of Califoria, Berkeley), when I was in grad school, though the bombings were in the 80s and I was there in the early 90s. But when I was there he had not yet been caught, so we didn't know he wouldn't strike again.

In that case, the killer's identity was unknown, but with so much text authored by him, the FBI figured (correctly) that someone would recognize the killer by his writing, and that outweighed the negatives of giving him more publicity; he already had plenty of that.

> it generates clicks and people love to soak up that kind of stuff

Unfortunately, you answered your own question. If a news outlet doesn't cover it, people will switch to one that does, affecting their bottom line.

> Why give such a person a platform?

Because people have a right to know, and I don't want big corporations to decide what kind of information to hide from me.

I recall NPR in the US took some steps about covering stories like this based on what psychologists studying killers found from talking to them. They would try to minimize how often they mentioned things the killers wanted to hear in the news: The killer's name, limit describing the chaos of the event, avoid manifesto type discussions and just cover that aspect very generally.

Instead they'd focus on things that it seems like mass killers really don't like to hear about, the names of the victims, stories about the community and etc .... and in a lot of ways those actually seem like the more important things too.

Without notoriety, it is unlikely the puzzle would be solved. Many cases are solved with tips following news reports. So reduced coverage could lead to reduced apprehension rates.

Alternatively, what benefit does reduced coverage offer? Do we know that less notoriety means fewer or less prolific serial killers? Maybe they would be even more prolific trying to get attention.

So if reduced coverage leads to reduced crime, then great. But if not, then denying them notoriety just hurts their feelings.

That’s great, but as it might lead to reduced apprehensions, I don’t think hurting their feelings is worth it.

Note: I don’t mean to belittle your point. I don’t like that society is so fascinated by crime either. But I think that is a separate issue.

> Without notoriety, it is unlikely the puzzle would be solved.

I literally do not care one bit about this puzzle being solved. I do care, a lot, about people not getting shot when they go to the supermarket.

Those two things aren’t connected. Also, many people do care about solving this puzzle, both for the sake of cryptography and for the chance it will provide closure to the case, if not justice, at this point.

We needn’t worry about the stimulating effect revisiting decades-old crimes of an entirely different nature, for scientific purposes, may have.

The Zodiac puzzle was not involved in the shooting this week. It's ok to solve the puzzle.

Don't blame puzzle solvers for an old rotting and recurrent problem that the politicians could stop at any moment if they would really want it.

there is considerable research on mass shootings. Guaranteed notoreity is a stimulus.

The context here is key to why the OPs contribution is meaningless waffle.

There is a difference between a 50 year old cold case and a killing that happened last week.

In the case of a recent homicide with an actual arrest the "focus on the victims rather than the criminal" thing makes some sense.

In the case of the zodiac and other ancient cold cases it's rather irrelevant.

This is a good policy. I recently watched "The Investigation" (Efterforskningen), a Danish TV dramatisation of the investigation into the murder of Kim Wall in 2017. Something I realised after a while is that the accused is never named nor shown or heard in the show, at all.

There's no detail lost, it's an in-depth retelling, it has all the information you need to get an understanding of the case. It also doesn't feel forced – it took me a while to notice it.

I believe the show does justice to the victim without giving anything to the perpetrator, and it's refreshing.

"the show does justice to the victim" -- I'm not sure what that means, whether it can be meaningful. I imagine most victims would rather just be left alone, including the dead ones.

I can't imagine that the family of the victim would experience any "justice" from the mass consumption of their grief and pain for entertainment.

Fair point, maybe I took that too far.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I felt the show was as respectful to the victim as possible.

I find your sentiment to be better rephrased as:

> I dislike the degree to which people are fascinated by serial killers/criminals in general

People seek this stuff out ravenously. Most of the supply of information, at least to me, appears to be driven by the demand for it. I've never been particularly interested in it, personally.

Abnormal psychology, including serial or mass killers, is fascinating. One can learn some things about how people work by studying these outliers.

Besides, there’s value in being occasionally reminded that some small fraction of people in your community are actually predators, even though 99% of the people you interact with are perfectly ordinary.

I generally agree but in this case the damage was already done. The Zodiac sent three mails to local newspapers and the San Francisco Chronicle was the first to publish the cryptogram (all of them was eventually published though). The Zodiac continued to send most subsequent threats and cryptograms to the Chronicle expecting quick turnaround, and I feel the Chronicle essentially fed the Zodiac Killer in midst of its battle against the Examiner.

I think this is an admirable attitude, but damnatio memoriae didn't work for Herostratus. I think we should take more active measures (buybacks, additional licensing limitations, training/storage requirements, etc) in the USA to reduce the number of firearms.

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