Speaker 1: The public has had a long held fascination with detectives.
Speaker 1: Detective see aside of life the average person is never
Speaker 1: exposed to. I spent thirty four years as a cop.
Speaker 1: For twenty five of those years I was catching killers.
Speaker 1: That's what I did for a living. I was a
Speaker 1: homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead,
Speaker 1: I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated.
Speaker 1: The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories
Speaker 1: from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw
Speaker 1: and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some
Speaker 1: of the content and language might be confronting. That's because
Speaker 1: no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged.
Speaker 1: Join me now as I take you into this world.
Speaker 1: What there's the difference between a serial killer and a
Speaker 1: lone actor? Today I'm joined by Ern Sherrington. Ern is
Speaker 1: a forensic psychologist who became a detective and moved into
Speaker 1: counter terrorism and loan actor threat assessment. If anyone's qualified
Speaker 1: to talk about acts of mass violence, it's him. Ian Sherrington.
Speaker 1: Welcome to I Catch Killers.
Speaker 2: Thank you Gary for having me.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm excited about the conversation. We're going to have.
Speaker 1: You've got some vast experience and a whole range of things.
Speaker 1: You've got the academic take on crime, and also you
Speaker 1: worked as a police officer for a very long time
Speaker 1: over in the UK.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so I'm slightly unusual in that
Speaker 2: sense that I was a detective for many years, but
Speaker 2: also before that I was a psychologist and academic as well,
Speaker 2: So yeah, have that combination.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it's a different way of looking at crime.
Speaker 1: Speaking of crime, I look today that lay in actors,
Speaker 1: mass killings, extreme ideology, that seems to be the concern
Speaker 1: of law enforcement and the major concern. I look back
Speaker 1: at my career in homicide, and we had the gangland killings,
Speaker 1: we had occasionally serial killings. We looked at that that
Speaker 1: was the focus of domestic domestic violence. But am I
Speaker 1: reading the landscape correctly, like these mess killings loan actors
Speaker 1: a realistic threat to law enforcement in this day and age.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean when I started my career, I worked
Speaker 2: almost exclusively on serial killer cases things like that as
Speaker 2: a behavioral analyst, So I thought a lot about that
Speaker 2: and I was aware of kind of these issues then,
Speaker 2: but certainly in recent years the loan actors style mass attack.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it's terrorism, sometimes it's not. But that sort of
Speaker 2: attack is far more prevalent today, and in my opinion,
Speaker 2: it's a growing problem, and not a problem that's particularly
Speaker 2: like just focused on one country. It's an international issue, certainly. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's the way I would see it.
Speaker 1: Before we get into the detail, because I want to
Speaker 1: talk about those indicators and all that tell us a
Speaker 1: bit about your background, because I find that fascinating, and
Speaker 1: the psychologists have become a policeman. I've seen it the
Speaker 1: other way around thee Yeah, yeah, it tell us about
Speaker 1: your journey.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So when I was a kid, I sort of
Speaker 2: loved d Agatha Christie, you know, Arthur Conan, Douge, Shelock Holmes,
Speaker 2: all that stuff. So I was sort of obsessed with
Speaker 2: the whole thing before, you know, when I was quite young,
Speaker 2: and as I got older, I got into the psychology
Speaker 2: of it, and I started reading books about serial killers,
Speaker 2: which is kind of worrying, isn't it in a way.
Speaker 2: But as a fifteen year old, but I read a
Speaker 2: book People, one of the indicators that we probably back then. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so I've sort of turned it around. But I read
Speaker 2: a book called Alone with the Devil, which is a
Speaker 2: book by an American psychiatrist. His name is Ronald Markman.
Speaker 2: It's a book from the eighties, so I don't even
Speaker 2: know if you can get it anymore. But he talked
Speaker 2: a lot about interviewing Charles Manson's followers, and it was
Speaker 2: sort of in my head like how did how did
Speaker 2: he manage to convince those people to get involved in
Speaker 2: a murder and all this sort of stuff, and so
Speaker 2: I just found it fascinating the book, and from there
Speaker 2: I basically went to university studied psychology, and then from
Speaker 2: there I did a master's in friends psychology. So I
Speaker 2: got involved in understanding criminals, particularly murders and sexual offenses.
Speaker 2: And most of the class that I was in that
Speaker 2: course with went on to work in prisons or clinical psychology,
Speaker 2: Whereas I always had this thing kind of in a
Speaker 2: sense of justice or I was interested, but I wanted
Speaker 2: to actually catch them, if that makes sense. I wanted
Speaker 2: to be on that side, which I guess is just individual.
Speaker 2: So I applied for a job at a national agency
Speaker 2: in the UK, and this is about twenty five years
Speaker 2: ago now, and I got the job and it was
Speaker 2: just being set up that unit. It was a kind
Speaker 2: of unit designed to study serial of sex offenders and
Speaker 2: stranger murderers across the UK. So we built a big
Speaker 2: database of these things, all the behaviors that you might
Speaker 2: see in a particular murder case. And what I'd done
Speaker 2: just before that was I done my dissertation on murder.
Speaker 2: So I looked specifically at a crime scene. If someone's
Speaker 2: attacked in a murder and their face is attacked, does
Speaker 2: that indicate whether or not the suspect knew their victim?
Speaker 2: And I was allowed to go through a series of
Speaker 2: case files from a police force and examine this and
Speaker 2: study this and test it, and ultimately what the dissertation
Speaker 2: found was that there was two types of situations. One
Speaker 2: was if someone was killed and then the person wanted
Speaker 2: to cover up the crime. You know, body disposed, all
Speaker 2: that sort of thing. They sometimes would damage the face
Speaker 2: or the teeth, all that kind of thing you might
Speaker 2: see an organized crime, so they're disguising the identity of
Speaker 2: the victim. But the other side of it was when
Speaker 2: individuals knew the person, often they would attack someone's face
Speaker 2: because the face is like who they are, if that
Speaker 2: makes sense, like the window to your soul, it's.
Speaker 1: Who you and they're trying to bootherate that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean this is a kind of dissertation
Speaker 2: to do, but interesting for me at the time. So
Speaker 2: I took that with me and I went on to
Speaker 2: become a behavioral analyst, is what it's called. So I
Speaker 2: was a senior analyst at this unit and I did
Speaker 2: that for six or seven years. And what that unit's doing,
Speaker 2: it's really linking crimes. So what we were interested in
Speaker 2: was serial murders and sex offenses. So we were trying
Speaker 2: to see if we can link crimes across the country.
Speaker 2: There's a famous serial killer in the UK called Peter Sutcliffe,
Speaker 2: the Yorkshire Ripper if you heard of him. Yeah, So
Speaker 2: in the sort of late seventies, he attacked he killed
Speaker 2: thirteen women. He was a truck driver and he drove
Speaker 2: all over the north of England. And what they realized
Speaker 2: back then that you'd have murder investigations rue on bits
Speaker 2: of paper. There's no computers in the way that we
Speaker 2: have now, no DNA, so you're not linking crimes in
Speaker 2: the way that we would be able to now. So
Speaker 2: the unit was kind of set up for the purpose
Speaker 2: of trying to improve that because in the UK there's
Speaker 2: forty three different police forces, so this is the idea
Speaker 2: of trying to talk to them all, you know.
Speaker 1: And those investigations operating in silos and not passing on information.
Speaker 1: We had the same situation here that I won't say
Speaker 1: mistakes because we just didn't understand at that point in
Speaker 1: time the linkage that you could make between the investigations
Speaker 1: even between different state police but local area commands and
Speaker 1: crime and occur and be investigated in isolation. That type
Speaker 1: of study I've found that fascinating, And what you're talking
Speaker 1: about is not this similar to a journey I went
Speaker 1: on looking as a homicide detective, looking at those type
Speaker 1: of type of links between the offenses, and they also
Speaker 1: find that fascinating what can be told from a crime scene,
Speaker 1: the way the body is disposed of, and different things
Speaker 1: that you pick up from operational experience as a homicide detective.
Speaker 1: But I like the academic research that's done that clearly
Speaker 1: you're involved in that sort of supports the theories. Whereas
Speaker 1: a detective can walk in and go I think this
Speaker 1: has happened, but there's now it's just more of an instinct.
Speaker 1: But the academic research that in the field that you
Speaker 1: were doing was adding the science to it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Indeed, so if you imagine, you know, having now
Speaker 2: been a detective, you can't done it the other way around,
Speaker 2: like you say, but you start to realize that actually,
Speaker 2: as a detective, a lot of kind of what makes
Speaker 2: your career, if you like, is the cases you work.
Speaker 2: You know, in that unit, I was exposed to more cases,
Speaker 2: like understanding them, reading them than an average detective would
Speaker 2: ever be. So the value comes partly from the research
Speaker 2: and the analysis, but also from seeing so many of them.
Speaker 2: Because in one police force in the UK, you don't
Speaker 2: have many serial murders or many stranger rapes and things
Speaker 2: like that. So we would be sent into the inquiry
Speaker 2: team quite early on in the investigation. We'd go to
Speaker 2: the crime scene, we do all of those kinds of things,
Speaker 2: meet with the SiO, and then we'd give them advice
Speaker 2: and write a report. But we're also given them suggestions
Speaker 2: of investigations, investigative suggestions they might want to follow because
Speaker 2: we've seen it in another case. So it's kind of
Speaker 2: useful to bring that knowledge. And obviously the purpose is
Speaker 2: also to try and link crime, so try and bring
Speaker 2: in other offenses or suspects that they may not have
Speaker 2: considered that live in other parts of the country. Having
Speaker 2: done it for a number of years, what I found
Speaker 2: was that it really worked the best if you caught someone.
Speaker 2: So take Peter Sutcliffe as an example. You could then
Speaker 2: look back over their crimes and consider not just their behavior,
Speaker 2: the sort of behaviors that they would show in their crime,
Speaker 2: which is kind of this idea of an mo you know,
Speaker 2: it's this signature of how they behave, but also where
Speaker 2: they lived, where they worked, what their movements were over
Speaker 2: many years, and you tend to give you like then
Speaker 2: like anchor points that you can draw in other crimes from.
Speaker 2: There's lots of examples where that's being quite successful, but
Speaker 2: with sort of linkage behavior which isn't too dissimilar to
Speaker 2: what I'm interested in now. Is what you're looking at
Speaker 2: is you're putting yourself in the mind of that person,
Speaker 2: which is a kind of a dark approach, but it's
Speaker 2: the necessary approach. Yeah, I do understand that. Yeah, So
Speaker 2: if you look at a series of say a series
Speaker 2: of murders, often people start at a younger age, they
Speaker 2: get older over the years. If they get away with
Speaker 2: it long enough, But also they start to learn behaviors
Speaker 2: from previous incidents because say it's gone wrong for them,
Speaker 2: or they've been caught once for a minor offense, so
Speaker 2: they might be more careful next time, or they might
Speaker 2: decide to choose to target someone in a different location
Speaker 2: because it's easier for them to get away with it.
Speaker 2: So you start to try and work that out. Always
Speaker 2: in your mind, it's not like you can link crimes
Speaker 2: just say well, they're exactly the same, because they never are.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that used to strike me
Speaker 2: about it was when it's planned, you know, the idea
Speaker 2: of planning a murder attack or a murder of this kind.
Speaker 2: Often there are similarities between them, but a lot of
Speaker 2: these offenders are people with jobs, with everyday lives. Many
Speaker 2: of them had families, so they live a normal routine.
Speaker 2: So often their offending would hang off the routine. But
Speaker 2: sometimes they would just basically be given an opportunity by chance,
Speaker 2: so that then suddenly they commit a crime that's quite
Speaker 2: different to the rest of the others. So these are
Speaker 2: all sorts of things that used to have to think about.
Speaker 1: It's complicated. The choice of victims is always an interesting
Speaker 1: who the victims are, and that Peter Sutcliffe one. Did
Speaker 1: he have a particular style of victim that he would.
Speaker 2: Target, Yes, so he was known to target sex workers. Initially,
Speaker 2: he was unusual in the sense that he's very violent
Speaker 2: and very immediate violence, often using weapons. He used to
Speaker 2: take a hammer around with him and attack victims like that.
Speaker 2: As the years went on and it was more difficult
Speaker 2: to catch him, he became this idea that the FBI used,
Speaker 2: which is this organized versus disorganized kind of patterns of
Speaker 2: serial killers. He started off quite organized, and then as
Speaker 2: it went on, he became more disorganized, so he became
Speaker 2: more reckless. He stopped targeting sex workers and started to
Speaker 2: attack other women. But he was able to use his
Speaker 2: job as a means with which to kind of come
Speaker 2: in and out of a particular community and move into
Speaker 2: another community very easily. And I suppose when you look
Speaker 2: at a crime like that in the seventies, as I said,
Speaker 2: you've got no DNA, you've got no CCTV. Really, you've
Speaker 2: got nothing like that at all. Totally different environmental Yeah,
Speaker 2: so in some senses, I mean, we didn't exist then either.
Speaker 2: We went back through those kinds of crimes and other
Speaker 2: serial killers crimes, but in some senses the behae in
Speaker 2: those days, the behaviors or you really go up to
Speaker 2: link crimes together. Nowadays a lot of DNA science makes
Speaker 2: it possible to do that much easier.
Speaker 1: Well, you can with durna that's left you. Instead of
Speaker 1: speculating that these crimes are linked, you can lock it in.
Speaker 1: We've had that with serial sex offenders where the durna
Speaker 1: has been left at the scene. The other thing I
Speaker 1: find interesting in something that I think from an investigative
Speaker 1: point of view, quite often we miss, but it's interesting
Speaker 1: that you raise it. The lifestyle of the offender. Sometimes
Speaker 1: that pattern that you're trying to work out what the
Speaker 1: patterns all about, but it's quite often linked to their
Speaker 1: home environment or their employment. We had a rapist on
Speaker 1: the North Shore that was operating and he would only
Speaker 1: strike on Tuesdays and Thursday nights, and it was confusing
Speaker 1: at first, what's this about, But as it eventually played
Speaker 1: out and he was arrested, charged and convicted with the offenses,
Speaker 1: it was to do with knights that he was away
Speaker 1: from home because he was supposedly doing a tech course
Speaker 1: or an evening course. So he could leave his home
Speaker 1: without any suspicion boom rays. But that's why Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Speaker 1: But it's a complex thing. But I was fortunate in
Speaker 1: my career worked very closely with doctor Sarah Yull forensic
Speaker 1: psychologists in New South Wales Police, and I found it
Speaker 1: fascinating getting that different different perspective from the psychological perspective.
Speaker 1: You have the police and we look at things a
Speaker 1: certain way, and then having someone come in and she
Speaker 1: would quite often we'd have briefing, after briefings, sit down
Speaker 1: with her and she'd explained something and the moment she said,
Speaker 1: I think, yes, okay, that's what we need. I embrace
Speaker 1: working with Sarah. I love working with Sarah. There was
Speaker 1: some police that had a bit of a resistance to it,
Speaker 1: or what are these quacks going to bring into Did
Speaker 1: you experience that at all? Was there any resistance with
Speaker 1: the expertise that you bought into criminal investigation because as
Speaker 1: you know as now having worked as a cop, we
Speaker 1: can be fairly sitting their ways.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's been an interesting journey. I smiled slightly then,
Speaker 2: because I'm sort of remembering my younger self. But yeah,
Speaker 2: we would be sent into major investigations, you know, policing.
Speaker 2: Back then you're kind of going into often quite a
Speaker 2: male dominated environment as well, and sometimes slightly macho environment.
Speaker 2: And yeah, you're a kind of twenty something psychologist with
Speaker 2: an opinion. I was quite opinionated. I think at the time,
Speaker 2: I'm smiling there. Yeah, you can imagine me, can't you.
Speaker 2: Who's that? You know, what's he doing here? Sort of thing.
Speaker 2: So every now and again i'd say something valuable and
Speaker 2: then you'd get the attention of an SiO. You know,
Speaker 2: you would have that, and often it was about building trust.
Speaker 2: But you know, you've been a murder SiO. I mean,
Speaker 2: you don't have much time to think. Your huge pressure's
Speaker 2: lots to think about all at once, and so a
Speaker 2: psychologist or a behavioral analyst kind of pointing out a
Speaker 2: few things is one of the things you need to
Speaker 2: think about, but not necessarily always the priority. So it
Speaker 2: was difficult early days to get to get heard, and
Speaker 2: over time we just sort of built a relationship. So
Speaker 2: what you found was if you worked with the same SiO,
Speaker 2: then you tended to have a kind of better relationship.
Speaker 1: And I was like, they can understand that the value
Speaker 1: you can add to the investigation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, And often people often think about crime
Speaker 2: analysis as intelligence analysis, which is a different thing. It's
Speaker 2: much more to do with linking intelligence and even sometimes
Speaker 2: doing charts and kind of showing crime patterns and things
Speaker 2: like that. That's not really what we were doing. We
Speaker 2: were doing behavioral linkage, so we were in a different space.
Speaker 2: But I was assigned my career, I was assigned the
Speaker 2: North of England and Scotland as a senior around list,
Speaker 2: so I spent a lot of time up there, even
Speaker 2: though I lived in the South of England, and spent
Speaker 2: time with some of the Scottish CIOs in Glasgow and
Speaker 2: Edinburgh and then in the North of England too, so
Speaker 2: we kind of build a relationship to the point then
Speaker 2: that they might ring you up and say what do
Speaker 2: you think of this behavior? As often the questions we'd
Speaker 2: get because it was a bit odd or so odd
Speaker 2: behaviors are sometimes useful because underneath there's some reason for them,
Speaker 2: but you often see them in series, you know, links
Speaker 2: and patterns. It was interesting, but all I'd say is
Speaker 2: becoming an SAA years later, I'm always very nice to analysts,
Speaker 2: as you can imagine, because because I understand it, and
Speaker 2: I kind of see their plate.
Speaker 1: If you like, you know, look, is a team in
Speaker 1: any homicide investigation or major investigation, that's a team effort
Speaker 1: from the bottom persons at the top person. It's all
Speaker 1: about contributing. But I'm just reflecting on some of the
Speaker 1: things that Sarah helped me with. I was on a
Speaker 1: serial killing case and the victims four year old girl,
Speaker 1: sixteen year old girl, and sixteen year old boy. And
Speaker 1: it was hard to articulate because we're pushing this matter
Speaker 1: through court and a whole range of things, and hard
Speaker 1: to articulate because people going, well, you say, because I
Speaker 1: was arguing that these crimes are linked, and it would
Speaker 1: be put back, well, oh that the victims one's a
Speaker 1: four year old girl, one's a sixteen year old girl,
Speaker 1: sixteen year old boy. And I try to articulate that
Speaker 1: they were linked. And there was very good reasons why
Speaker 1: these crimes were linked, and the tendency and coincidence evidence
Speaker 1: that were related, the way the bodies were disposed of.
Speaker 1: But Sarah, when I was creating documents for the court
Speaker 1: and doing affidavids and different things, identified that this person
Speaker 1: was motivated. It was a sexual motivation. And he is
Speaker 1: prepared to kill to get a sexual satisfaction. He wasn't
Speaker 1: driven by the sex, wasn't aimed at the victims, but
Speaker 1: it was he was prepared to kill those victims to
Speaker 1: satisfy his sexual urges. And all of a sudden, it
Speaker 1: was a light bulb moment. And I've been working on
Speaker 1: the case for years trying to argue and justify why
Speaker 1: I'm saying these crimes are linked, and just little things
Speaker 1: like that I felt were beneficial another thing that I
Speaker 1: would use the psychologists for in police in I'd like
Speaker 1: to get your view on this because I think you've
Speaker 1: done some study on this as well, about police interviews,
Speaker 1: whether it's a crucial witness or the suspect, and break
Speaker 1: it down in the basis or the most basic form
Speaker 1: carried or a stick, What way should I approach the interview?
Speaker 1: I found that beneficial before I sat down in the
Speaker 1: interview room. Sometimes is that something that you were involved
Speaker 1: in as well?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't personally advise around that, but we did
Speaker 2: give them a sense of what sort of person they
Speaker 2: might be talking too about years later, when I'm doing
Speaker 2: the police interviews myself and I've been in Sao where
Speaker 2: we've had psychologists and we've had people guiding us in
Speaker 2: terms of the approach to interviews. And I'm a big
Speaker 2: advocate of the whole peace model and the rapport of things,
Speaker 2: so that back in the day, even when I started,
Speaker 2: I mean when I was a police officer, you know,
Speaker 2: you were sort of thrown in and you ask your
Speaker 2: questions a little bit kind of staccata, don't you and
Speaker 2: looking at a piece of paper and all this, and
Speaker 2: I sort of came with a different view because of
Speaker 2: my background, I guess, so I used to keep it
Speaker 2: very relaxed and try and not it's not befriending people,
Speaker 2: you know, you know what they've done, but it's just
Speaker 2: about kind of sometimes preparing beforehand so they don't dislike
Speaker 2: you if you like immediately. And sometimes as an SiO,
Speaker 2: we had interview teams that interviewed suspects and I would
Speaker 2: make a decision to pull someone out of that because
Speaker 2: the suspect clearly doesn't like their face or the way
Speaker 2: they come across, whatever it is. They might remind them
Speaker 2: of someone, but they didn't have the rapport. And I
Speaker 2: just think rapport if you're going to get anywhere in
Speaker 2: a police interview I think reports important, so I always
Speaker 2: choose to try and make conversational. Obviously, in the back
Speaker 2: of your head you've got the kind of points you
Speaker 2: want to get across and the evidence that you want
Speaker 2: to try and improve. But I found no real benefits
Speaker 2: of trying to take someone head on or morally kind
Speaker 2: of dominate them if you like, because of what they've done.
Speaker 1: I always felt in the interview room the most simplest
Speaker 1: form not to show judgment, not to sit there and
Speaker 1: if I'm interviewing you just sort of rolling my eyes.
Speaker 1: If you talk about something and not be judgmental, if
Speaker 1: anyone's going to open up to you, you can't sit
Speaker 1: there being judgmental with your arms crossed and giving them attitude.
Speaker 1: It's about having a conversation and letting them because one
Speaker 1: thing I found in the interview room is that people
Speaker 1: often say, how do you get a confession out of someone?
Speaker 1: Quite often, and we're not talking perhaps serial killers or
Speaker 1: maybe serial killers, but quite often people want to unburden themselves.
Speaker 1: They carry this guilt of a crime, and if I'm honest,
Speaker 1: what I'm is letting them unburden the pressure of carrying
Speaker 1: this secret that's been troubling them for a long time,
Speaker 1: and that often pays dividends in the interview room.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, there's lots of examples of serial killers, particularly
Speaker 2: where they haven't they've never admitted their crimes, you know,
Speaker 2: So in some ways they're not going to do it
Speaker 2: in the first few days to a police officer. They
Speaker 2: haven't done it their whole life. Even those that have
Speaker 2: died haven't admitted anything, if that makes sense. So it's
Speaker 2: always worth worth trying, as you say, to kind of
Speaker 2: get someone to unburden themselves. But I always used to
Speaker 2: kind of try and see it as a relationship of
Speaker 2: sorts that in that moment, because if you think about
Speaker 2: what we talked about a bit earlier, the serial killer
Speaker 2: sort of mindset, a lot of that's about power and
Speaker 2: dominance and things. Anyway, they don't want to be caught.
Speaker 2: They don't they want to ultimately come out again. They're
Speaker 2: not necessarily going to listen to you if you start
Speaker 2: challenging them on everything or look down on them. But yeah, interviewing,
Speaker 2: I used to love interviewing just because it was one
Speaker 2: of those things where I suppose, to a point, you're trying,
Speaker 2: you're trying to get them to, as you say, unburden themselves,
Speaker 2: admit the crime, and sometimes that would happen, and sometimes
Speaker 2: completely to your own surprise. I remember once interviewing a
Speaker 2: guy for a series of kind of knife point robberies.
Speaker 2: Didn't speak at all, and then right at the end
Speaker 2: he just kind of cracked and started crying and apologized
Speaker 2: and all that sort of you know. So it can happen.
Speaker 2: Is even when they say no comment repeatedly, which is
Speaker 2: often the case, if the interview is good enough to
Speaker 2: kind of get across their points and try and connect
Speaker 2: with them. Connect him with someone that's not even talking
Speaker 2: back to you is quite difficult, but if they're able
Speaker 2: to do that, then it can be really effective.
Speaker 1: How did you find your way from being the psychologist
Speaker 1: and the nerdy kid that comes into the stripe force
Speaker 1: room or the incident room and explains what you've learned
Speaker 1: at UNI to becoming a police officer, because that's a
Speaker 1: big career change for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I was quite well established, so it was
Speaker 2: a big jump and I went back to being a
Speaker 2: police you know, bobby on the beat as they call
Speaker 2: it in London. So that was the stepmade.
Speaker 1: So just to make this so I thought, we understand that.
Speaker 1: So you're there, you're working on major crimes, you're I mean,
Speaker 1: an input to it, but you've decided you wanted a
Speaker 1: career in law enforcement, like as in being a swamp
Speaker 1: swarm member.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what it was. I worked on a case as
Speaker 2: a guy called Robert Black, who's a child killer from
Speaker 2: the UK in the eighties. One of the most awful
Speaker 2: people really, and it was a difficult case. But he
Speaker 2: killed three young girls over a period of about five years.
Speaker 2: But as I said earlier, there was no DNA then,
Speaker 2: there was nothing like that. He drove a van he
Speaker 2: used to deliver posters and things. He came from Scotland
Speaker 2: and he abduct the children and the borders of Scotland
Speaker 2: or north of England, and then after he murdered them,
Speaker 2: he took them to sort of the Midlands about three
Speaker 2: hundred miles or so away, dumped their bodies and it
Speaker 2: went on for years and he wasn't caught, so I
Speaker 2: picked it up after he was caught. He was caught
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety but the way he was caught so
Speaker 2: he was he was in the process of abducting another
Speaker 2: young girl in Scotland and someone saw him snatch the
Speaker 2: girl from the street, heart her in the van, and
Speaker 2: he took down the registration number. It always gives me
Speaker 2: chills to talk about this or think about it. But
Speaker 2: this guy knew a local police officer, so he told
Speaker 2: him and so they looked out for this van and strangely,
Speaker 2: it drove straight back past. They saw the registration number.
Speaker 2: So the police officer stopped the van and then they
Speaker 2: opened the back of the van and the young girl,
Speaker 2: I think she was six years old, was in a
Speaker 2: sleeping bag, tied up in the van and she was
Speaker 2: still alive. But the police officer was her dad, just
Speaker 2: by chance. Yeah, So this extraordinary story. And he he
Speaker 2: was caught for that and then taken to a trial,
Speaker 2: and it took about four years to get him to
Speaker 2: trial for that fence another offense, and then the three
Speaker 2: that he'd murdered. And what amazed me about it was
Speaker 2: that back in those days, if you went to petrol station,
Speaker 2: you would like sign, wouldn't you with a pen to
Speaker 2: pay for something? But the petrol companies would keep all
Speaker 2: those receipts. They'd send them away to huge kind of warehouses.
Speaker 2: So nothing was digital then. And the police went through
Speaker 2: something like five hundred thousand petrol receipts in this investigation
Speaker 2: over years to work out where Robert Black was the
Speaker 2: times of all these murders, and just the sheer kind
Speaker 2: of effort magnitude. Yeah, and this is detectives, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: And I was just so impressed by it, and I
Speaker 2: was just sort of thinking, you know, wow, this is incredible.
Speaker 2: And then later years later, I worked on a similar case.
Speaker 2: It was an island that was linked to that series,
Speaker 2: and he was actually convicted of that about twenty years later,
Speaker 2: and again the same thing. They went through so much
Speaker 2: information and took it took so many years, but they
Speaker 2: didn't give up. And there was something in that that
Speaker 2: just kind of lit me up. Really want to want
Speaker 2: to join the police. And I had this. I was older,
Speaker 2: so I had this strange feeling of like, do I
Speaker 2: really want to do this, you know, go back to
Speaker 2: uniform and be in the tough streets of London and
Speaker 2: all this sort of thing. And most of my classmates
Speaker 2: were like eighteen, They looked about twelve, you know, and
Speaker 2: I imagine yeah, and I was I was sort of
Speaker 2: like completely out of almost out of my depth. You
Speaker 2: have to fight people as well, and you know, and
Speaker 2: all that stuff. And it was obviously they you know,
Speaker 2: they fight you, but have to fight back sometimes. But
Speaker 2: I remember I remember a couple of times in the
Speaker 2: classes in the training center sort of answering questions with
Speaker 2: this sort of I know about serial murder and you know,
Speaker 2: and my classmates were not impressed at all. So it
Speaker 2: was a very rude awakening. It was like, no, you've
Speaker 2: got to go to this shoplifting, you know. So it
Speaker 2: was it was a tough transition, but it was something
Speaker 2: about that case was a big part of it. Just
Speaker 2: I wanted to be a detective and I was kind
Speaker 2: of willing to take the step. I just wanted to
Speaker 2: be closer to I guess, the action, the result, you know,
Speaker 2: the justice part of it. You really want to.
Speaker 1: I think from a career point of view, being a
Speaker 1: detective and on big cases, I find it fascinating and
Speaker 1: that's so stimulating. And that's not dismissing the horrific nature
Speaker 1: of the crimes that you're investigating, but to get on
Speaker 1: an investigation and work it through from start to finish,
Speaker 1: that can be a very rewarding career. How long did
Speaker 1: it take you to get back into the field there's
Speaker 1: a detective and start leading investigations.
Speaker 2: In the UK, you do two years probation they call it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so I guess it's similar here. But yeah, so two
Speaker 2: years in uniform, which was a huge grounding. I have
Speaker 2: to say, like, you know, it's it's a really important
Speaker 2: thing and it makes you understand the kind of people
Speaker 2: and what you're dealing with all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: So I joined the CID so I think they call
Speaker 2: the CIB here, so it's General Investigation Detectives. So I
Speaker 2: was a kind of a constable working in London. So
Speaker 2: I became an acting detective sergeant fairly quickly, work some
Speaker 2: cases doing that, and then I moved police forces. I
Speaker 2: moved to a county force, which is like a country
Speaker 2: force if you like. Again another sort of shock really
Speaker 2: from London to that. Weirdly, I was busier because I
Speaker 2: think you get more crimes given to you as a detective,
Speaker 2: but the place that the area is safer largely than
Speaker 2: a city, you know. So there I took promotion, so
Speaker 2: I became a DI and that's when I started to
Speaker 2: sort of SiO things, I think, and I was on
Speaker 2: a proactive team, so we targeted robberies and burglars and
Speaker 2: kind of this idea of child sexual exploitation, human trafficking,
Speaker 2: things like that. So that point I then started to
Speaker 2: run those cases. And then what what I found was
Speaker 2: like all this stuff I'd learned before, which I'd had
Speaker 2: to almost bury really to be kind of authentic in that, you.
Speaker 1: Know, you concentrate on the general the boot policing and yeah,
Speaker 1: do that. Yeah, I can understand that all your academic
Speaker 1: studies wouldn't have come in the great deal of assistance
Speaker 1: at that stage.
Speaker 2: I used to get told off because I would interview
Speaker 2: for too long and so hopefully won't go on, but
Speaker 2: or I would, you know, I would overthink like the crime.
Speaker 1: You know, Sorry, I shouldn't be laughing at He's understandable,
Speaker 1: and I can imagine that, but yeah, it would be
Speaker 1: hard for you, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Because if you sort of you're trying to analyze as
Speaker 2: someone who's I don't know, stealing from a shop and
Speaker 2: you're trying to understand why they do it and all
Speaker 2: this sort of stuff, and then you've got thirty crimes
Speaker 2: to investigate, you know, and your sergeants sort of hitting
Speaker 2: around the head going can you please if you're still
Speaker 2: in the interview room. Yeah, can you please just close
Speaker 2: that one? It was a bit like that. I'm luckily
Speaker 2: for me, I had good, good supervisors who sort of
Speaker 2: knocked it out of me. But then as I kind
Speaker 2: of grew back up into a DEI and the later
Speaker 2: a detective chief inspector, I was able to draw back
Speaker 2: on that knowledge and experience. So it kind of went
Speaker 2: full circle. Because the more serious the crime you're involved
Speaker 2: in them, as you said earlier, the more helpful it
Speaker 2: is to have an understanding of why they do it,
Speaker 2: you know, and how to how to apply that. And
Speaker 2: I kind of often lent on people like I was
Speaker 2: when I was younger, brought them in because it just
Speaker 2: helped me and it kept me kind of in touch
Speaker 2: with that. So but yeah, an interesting and interesting journey.
Speaker 2: I was really glad not to have completely left it behind.
Speaker 1: How did your interest get into glowing actors and mess killings?
Speaker 1: What drew you into interest in that field?
Speaker 2: So? I was working as a detective inspector in child protection,
Speaker 2: so how to I ran a unit which investigated child
Speaker 2: abuse child sexual exploitation, which is this kind of a
Speaker 2: it's a more modern term, but it's kind of bringing
Speaker 2: normally young teenage girls into kind of prostitution, sex work,
Speaker 2: stuff like that, and it's a pretty difficult, difficult crime
Speaker 2: to get your head around. But often what was sort
Speaker 2: of involved in those cases was this idea of vulnerability
Speaker 2: and people being drawn into it and older men or
Speaker 2: merely kind of offering money or opportunity or things like
Speaker 2: that to kind of kind of get their own sexual
Speaker 2: kind of gratification, I suppose. And at the time, what
Speaker 2: was happening in sort of work the world of extremism
Speaker 2: and terrorism was young people getting drawn into that, and
Speaker 2: what you could see was it's kind of a similar
Speaker 2: process in some ways, this idea of radicalization, but the
Speaker 2: process is really taking vulnerable people, often young people, and
Speaker 2: sort of drawing them into crime. And it's almost comparable
Speaker 2: as well to grooming in gangs. You know, often you
Speaker 2: get you get people, and what you sort of see
Speaker 2: is the young people tend to have these kind of
Speaker 2: shattered lives, abuse perhaps at home, or difficulties at home,
Speaker 2: and then they're trying to find a place for themselves
Speaker 2: and they get drawn into the wrong crowd. They're trying
Speaker 2: to find the yea. Quite often this is it and
Speaker 2: it's a powerful thing. So there was sort of a
Speaker 2: direct translation across into that, and I saw a job
Speaker 2: in counter terrorism, but it was counter extremism stuff initially,
Speaker 2: so it was looking at how to sort of reduce
Speaker 2: that radicalization and help vulnerable mostly children but sometimes adults,
Speaker 2: how to steer them out of it, how to support
Speaker 2: and help them. That was my first kind of step
Speaker 2: into that, and there's a lot of there's a lot
Speaker 2: of psychology in that the process, and so it interested
Speaker 2: me that that idea of it. So I did that
Speaker 2: for a few years, and then because I was a
Speaker 2: detective and I had experience, applied for another job then
Speaker 2: as an SiO. So that an SiO in that world
Speaker 2: means that you're you're effective. Some of your work is
Speaker 2: kind of working with people that haven't done anything, but
Speaker 2: you're monitoring them effectively. But quite a lot of it
Speaker 2: is around investigating crimes or near near kind of crimes.
Speaker 2: So this is where mass attacks became on the radar,
Speaker 2: so I was involved. I can't talk like too far
Speaker 2: into those just because they're recent and they're sensitive, but
Speaker 2: these are crimes that involve individuals that have that intention
Speaker 2: to carry out mass attacks. Sometimes the attack itself is
Speaker 2: quite kind of not always clear cut its terrorism or not.
Speaker 2: It's often a debate about that, and that sort of
Speaker 2: rages on in the background. But I was able to
Speaker 2: work on some of those cases, and when you do that,
Speaker 2: you get very involved in trying to understand their journey
Speaker 2: to that. And as a detective it's a slightly different
Speaker 2: thing to a psychologist in a sense. And you'd know
Speaker 2: this very well, is that when you're looking at someone's
Speaker 2: background that's carried out a murder or a crime like that,
Speaker 2: you're interested in what evidence is that going to provide
Speaker 2: to the court. You know, that's your kind of almost
Speaker 2: your focus, isn't it. But I suppose I started to
Speaker 2: think about along with that is why have they done this?
Speaker 2: How have they got into this situation? Became aware of
Speaker 2: sort of that, and then I got involved in inquests,
Speaker 2: which is where you take these matters to a court,
Speaker 2: and the idea is not so much about convicting someone,
Speaker 2: but it's about why did this happen? How can we
Speaker 2: stop it happened in the future. So I ended up
Speaker 2: doing all this sort of deep dive stuff and getting
Speaker 2: involved in trying to understand what was happening, and then
Speaker 2: an opportunity came to work as like the national lead
Speaker 2: for behavior if you like, so applying forensic psychology and
Speaker 2: all the behavioral work that I've done before to this issue.
Speaker 2: And so I did that for a number of years.
Speaker 2: So it's sort of perhaps a convoluted journey, but it
Speaker 2: was good for me to be able to kind of
Speaker 2: bring that back in and apply it slightly differently and
Speaker 2: be able to think about that thing. But really I'm
Speaker 2: still in the position now even where it's about understanding
Speaker 2: understanding why people do something in order to help you
Speaker 2: either stop it or investigate it. You know, that's the idea.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about your experience. But before we do,
Speaker 1: I just touch on the psychology of say a serial
Speaker 1: killer as compared to what motivates or what's the psychology
Speaker 1: behind someone that commits a violent offense in the loan Egg,
Speaker 1: the mess killing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, so I kind of look at it not
Speaker 2: so much in terms of what happens, you know, so
Speaker 2: obviously people are killed in these incidents either way, but
Speaker 2: look at it in terms of their intent, what's their purpose?
Speaker 2: And in a simple term, a serial killer is often
Speaker 2: almost exclusively interested in some sort of sexual gratification, So
Speaker 2: whether or not they actually use some sort of sexual
Speaker 2: behavior in the killing itself, or whether the act of
Speaker 2: killing is some kind of graification for them. Either way,
Speaker 2: it's very normally a sexual crime. That's the truth of it.
Speaker 2: With loan actors mass attacks, most of them, although there's
Speaker 2: different types, most of them focus on this idea of
Speaker 2: going out with a blaze of glory. So it's this
Speaker 2: idea of it's their last kind of hurrahs, their last moments,
Speaker 2: because the likelihood is they're either going to be killed
Speaker 2: afterwards by the law enforcement or they're going to be imprisoned,
Speaker 2: and so for them it's a final act. A serial
Speaker 2: killer by its nature, because it's sexual crime, they don't
Speaker 2: want to be caught. They want to carry on offending,
Speaker 2: whereas with these lone actor or these mass attacks, there's
Speaker 2: often a notoriety attached to it. So it's this idea
Speaker 2: of being remembered, being seen as special somehow, and sometimes
Speaker 2: that's in death and sometimes that's in life and they're
Speaker 2: in prison, but either way it's much more to do
Speaker 2: with that, and so you get quite a different profile
Speaker 2: generally between those two types of people. There is a
Speaker 2: sort of a blurring now which I've seen, which is
Speaker 2: this idea of nihilistic violin extremism, which is a term
Speaker 2: that's come from America in the last year or so.
Speaker 2: And these are people that are killing or doing these
Speaker 2: acts for the sake of it, because they have no
Speaker 2: real kind of attachment to society or morality, so they
Speaker 2: just want to do it for the sake of it.
Speaker 2: And so in some senses, I can see some links
Speaker 2: between this idea of serial killers doing it for the
Speaker 2: sake of it, But that's a kind of special niche
Speaker 2: if you like, of this problem. There's lots of different types.
Speaker 1: So terminology you said, yeah, is that something that America
Speaker 1: is starting or is starting to see in the US.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you see cases around the world, but
Speaker 2: certainly these are often young people. They're online and there's
Speaker 2: a subculture of young people online that talk about this thing,
Speaker 2: and the idea is it's around violence for violence sake.
Speaker 2: So what you don't see so much now in those
Speaker 2: cases particularly is an ideology or let's say they focus
Speaker 2: on a specific ideology, so they may have lots of
Speaker 2: different interest in ideologies, but ultimately they're not doing it
Speaker 2: for a cause they're doing it for the sake of it.
Speaker 2: They're doing it in order to achieve some notoriety, but
Speaker 2: also just to kind of cause destruction to society. That
Speaker 2: there's no kind of political, religious, ideol, logical cause around it.
Speaker 2: And it's a worrying trend. And it's a strange trend.
Speaker 2: And a lot of it is online, driven online by
Speaker 2: groups that communicate on the dark web or sometimes stream
Speaker 2: online too. So this sort of issue, because I've had
Speaker 2: this career where I've sort of followed these sort of
Speaker 2: mass murders or serial killings, I can almost see how
Speaker 2: it's evolved over time the last twenty twenty five years.
Speaker 2: So it's worrying, but it's kind of interesting for me
Speaker 2: too to understand it, because what I'm interested in is
Speaker 2: how can we prevent these kinds of acts? How can
Speaker 2: we stop them?
Speaker 1: It's concerning, isn't it That You've had another layer there?
Speaker 1: But with loan actors' mass killings, there's invariably not an
Speaker 1: escape plan, like they think this is their final statement.
Speaker 1: As you said earlier, they're making a statement that makes
Speaker 1: it difficult for policing, Like by the time police homicide
Speaker 1: investigation traditionally is a reactive investigation. The crimes occurred, and
Speaker 1: you investigate the crime. The big problem here all the
Speaker 1: tests of law enforcement now it's proactive investigation to prevent
Speaker 1: those crimes. By the time those crimes have happened, the
Speaker 1: catastrophic results from the crimes. So we've got to shift
Speaker 1: our focus from being reactive in investigating major crime to
Speaker 1: being proactive. Is that a fear assessment?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's a few things going on. I mean,
Speaker 2: obviously if the suspect dies in the process, which often happens,
Speaker 2: then there's a kind of difficulty for families of victims
Speaker 2: that there's no justice, right this kind of yeah, no
Speaker 2: answers as well, which is a very difficult thing. And
Speaker 2: so this kind of concern for law enforcement around how
Speaker 2: do we stop these things before they happen, as opposed
Speaker 2: to of course you can investigate them, and of course
Speaker 2: those that survive you can take to court, etc. But
Speaker 2: is there a way that we can actually prevent these
Speaker 2: before they happen? Which is a shift, and it's not
Speaker 2: always possible. It's not a case of like it's easy
Speaker 2: to do this. It's very difficult to spot these things.
Speaker 2: But certainly whenever I've looked back at cases that have
Speaker 2: happened and gone into the detail about that journey of
Speaker 2: the suspect before they carried out the attack, particularly in
Speaker 2: the weeks before. You can see signs indicators present in
Speaker 2: almost all cases, and that's what sort of interests me,
Speaker 2: and from a law enforcement point of view, obviously that's
Speaker 2: something that they should be tuned into, of course, but
Speaker 2: I guess for me and my experience, often when you
Speaker 2: see the indicators, it's almost before law enforcement are involved.
Speaker 2: It's tracking it back slightly earlier than that, because these
Speaker 2: kinds of behaviors are the sorts of things that you
Speaker 2: would see if you know that person day to day,
Speaker 2: you'd see a change because you know what they're like normally.
Speaker 1: So it's not leaving the petn of criminal offenses that
Speaker 1: have come to the attention of law enforcement. There's subtle
Speaker 1: shifts or changes that might not miss necessarily be brought
Speaker 1: to the attention of law enforcement.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, And often they're not brought to the attention
Speaker 2: of law enforcement because people either don't notice them, they're
Speaker 2: not tuned into what's going on, or they become normal
Speaker 2: these kinds of behaviors Because these often these people have
Speaker 2: extreme views or they behave in extreme sometimes violent ways
Speaker 2: in their life anyway. But also what they're not seeing
Speaker 2: is the opportunity to report. So they might worry about
Speaker 2: reporting it to law enforcement or to some of the
Speaker 2: support agencies that you now see around the world because
Speaker 2: they don't want to get them in trouble. They're concerned
Speaker 2: about what the outcome would be for their friend, loved one,
Speaker 2: all that kind of stuff. And I think human nature
Speaker 2: often people don't like to tell on other people, you know.
Speaker 1: And people were the closer you're goin to try to
Speaker 1: protect them and not. Yeah, bring the attention. But well,
Speaker 1: it's a shifting landscape, isn't it that, PEPs. We've all
Speaker 1: got to change the way we think and view things.
Speaker 1: Hey guys, it's Gary jubilin here. Want to get more
Speaker 1: out of I Catch Killers, then you should head over
Speaker 1: to our new video feed on Spotify where you can
Speaker 1: watch every episode of I Catch Killers. Just search for
Speaker 1: I Catch Killers video in your Spotify app and start
Speaker 1: watching today. Well here in your background, and it's fascinating
Speaker 1: and full credit to you for carving the career out
Speaker 1: in the way that you have. But I think it
Speaker 1: sets you up very well to talk about what we're
Speaker 1: talking about here about violent ideation and what is it?
Speaker 1: First of all, what is the thing behind these people that,
Speaker 1: whether they're alone actors or people that commit mass killings,
Speaker 1: these aggrievance is it? What's the grievance about, what's the
Speaker 1: tipping point about? Tell us just give us an overview
Speaker 1: of the type of people that commit these crimes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, so violent ideation. I'll try and I'll try
Speaker 2: and cover some of the labels because it's difficult for people,
Speaker 2: and they are they're often used interchangeably or they've changed
Speaker 2: every couple of years, So I try and make it
Speaker 2: sounds what it really is. But violent ideation slight something
Speaker 2: slightly different. It might it might happen in a mass attack,
Speaker 2: but it might not. But really that's the idea of
Speaker 2: having violent thoughts, intrusive thoughts, So people think about either
Speaker 2: harming themselves or other people, and it's something that's often
Speaker 2: linked to not you know, it's rare, but it can
Speaker 2: be linked to some mental health conditions, some serious mental
Speaker 2: health conditions, schizophrenia of being one of them, but there's others.
Speaker 2: So violent violent ideation isn't necessarily in always in these
Speaker 2: mass attack cases, what you do get, which is more common,
Speaker 2: is this idea of grievance. And so if we take
Speaker 2: this idea of ideology, which is ideological violence, which is
Speaker 2: the sort of classic carrying out an act of a
Speaker 2: mass attack, or an act of violence for a cause, religious, political, racial,
Speaker 2: all those sorts of things, and these are things that
Speaker 2: people might be familiar with, a grievance is something that
Speaker 2: is probably a better term to use, I would say nowadays,
Speaker 2: because often these cases have ideology and that's part of it,
Speaker 2: but often they don't, and sometimes they're just all mixed
Speaker 2: in together. It's really quite confusing. You can't you can't
Speaker 2: quite work out what they really believe. The reason I
Speaker 2: quite like the idea of a grievance, it's called grievance
Speaker 2: based violence or grievance fuel violence. The reason I like
Speaker 2: it is because it gets it gets away a little
Speaker 2: bit from the beliefs and it focuses more on the psychology,
Speaker 2: so that the idea that someone has a grievance is
Speaker 2: the idea that they've been wronged or they've been kind
Speaker 2: of affronted or and so they're angry about that and
Speaker 2: in a very simple sense. If someone has a personal grievance,
Speaker 2: it might be that they've been fired from their job, right,
Speaker 2: it's quite simple. So they've got a grievance against their
Speaker 2: boss or maybe the company, and they might decide, I'm
Speaker 2: so angry about that, I'm going to take action against that,
Speaker 2: you know, and they'll carry on an attack. And you
Speaker 2: see things like that. You might see cases where it's symbolic.
Speaker 2: So maybe the organization has done something to their family
Speaker 2: or something like that or them, and they decide to
Speaker 2: attack the building that represents that organization something like that.
Speaker 2: And these are sort of personal grievances, but that grievance
Speaker 2: could be against society, you know, if they blame society
Speaker 2: or the government, or the police or any individual person
Speaker 2: could be a celebrity. They blame them for their life,
Speaker 2: which is kind of they've got a bad life. They're isolated,
Speaker 2: they're marginalized, so they want that kind of it's like
Speaker 2: a revenge almost they want and they want that because
Speaker 2: they want their power back. They want they want to
Speaker 2: feel like they're powerful and they can overcome it. And
Speaker 2: that's the sort of psychology behind it. What we also
Speaker 2: see is this idea of where people adopt a particular cause,
Speaker 2: say a religious or political cause, which you see obviously
Speaker 2: in some of these cases, they take it on as
Speaker 2: a personal grievance internally, so they start they start to
Speaker 2: actually absorb that. If they're watching the TV and they
Speaker 2: see their particular group or whoever they associate with, and
Speaker 2: they don't have to be a member, they might just
Speaker 2: you know, support them, and they see them coming to
Speaker 2: harm or they see like bad things playing out, maybe
Speaker 2: they're going to feel that personally. So the process of
Speaker 2: a grievance is the same. So there's still having that
Speaker 2: feeling of anger, that feeling of like how dare you
Speaker 2: I'm going to get justice. It's just the fact that
Speaker 2: they're getting it for the group. They're defending the group.
Speaker 2: If that makes sense, Yeah, that does.
Speaker 1: You're breaking there's a grievance. What the initiated. The grievance
Speaker 1: can be from a personal grievance or an aspect with
Speaker 1: a group, an ideology that they don't believe in, something political,
Speaker 1: But the overriding thing is that it's a grievance that
Speaker 1: they've got.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the important thing is that unlike the sort
Speaker 2: of serial killer thing, which is often driven by sort
Speaker 2: of personal sexual gratification. This is driven by a kind
Speaker 2: of a sense of wanting to do something important, to
Speaker 2: do something meaningful for that group or for them to
Speaker 2: get their power back. But also it's often in these
Speaker 2: cases you see this idea of being remembered so notoriety,
Speaker 2: so this idea of they're effectively trying to be an
Speaker 2: important person, but they're coming from a low place, right,
Speaker 2: They're coming from a kind of low self worth, low
Speaker 2: self esteem place, and by doing this, they're kind of
Speaker 2: getting some groundback and they're able to do that, and
Speaker 2: so you go just onto the idea of a tipping point.
Speaker 2: So what you see in these cases is often a
Speaker 2: moment where they go from someone who's angry and might
Speaker 2: say stuff and might have little incidents where they tend
Speaker 2: to argue with people, or they might even get into
Speaker 2: a fight or do something maybe less violent but still violent,
Speaker 2: and then something happens that kind of pushes them to
Speaker 2: go all the way. And that kind of comes in
Speaker 2: two ways. The first would be like an internal tipping point.
Speaker 2: So most of that relates to things that go wrong
Speaker 2: in their life, like we all have it, don't we
Speaker 2: sort off, someone dies, divorce, lose your job, they might
Speaker 2: they might have an issue with immigration, or they might
Speaker 2: be arrested, something goes wrong, and at that point they're
Speaker 2: much more volatile and they've got less to lose. So
Speaker 2: tipping point is almost this idea of nothing to lose.
Speaker 2: The other sort of tipping point you get is an
Speaker 2: external one, so I call them flash points. But it's
Speaker 2: it's sort of thing like like you see on watching
Speaker 2: TV and there's a war on which you know is
Speaker 2: current at the moment someone's watching it. They're getting angry
Speaker 2: about that, and it's kind of it's gotten so angry
Speaker 2: they already have this this grievance or these beliefs.
Speaker 1: And they're sitting at home and they're saying, I a show,
Speaker 1: go into a school or something medi gazette and mets it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So cases can be tipped like that. So it
Speaker 2: means that someone goes from thinking about it, talking about it,
Speaker 2: to actually, right, I'm going to do something about this.
Speaker 2: That's what I'm going to do. And in those cases
Speaker 2: it's quite interesting nowadays, particularly because back in the day
Speaker 2: we used to watch TV and you'd see the images
Speaker 2: that you'd get on TV, right, that was it a
Speaker 2: few channels to choose from. Now people can go online
Speaker 2: and they can watch footage from someone's phone in the
Speaker 2: war zone, right or you know, it might it might
Speaker 2: be a not a war zone. It might be another attack.
Speaker 2: So it might be another attacks occurred somewhere, and that
Speaker 2: might inspire them to act too, do you see what
Speaker 2: I mean? So I do.
Speaker 1: And they can play it on Route peap before, they
Speaker 1: can watch it continuously, and yeah, they can fester on it.
Speaker 1: I can see how it changes the changes the dynamics completely.
Speaker 2: And there's a phenomena that occurs where people get angry
Speaker 2: about those things, but often also watch a lot of
Speaker 2: it because it desnsitizes them to it as well. Because
Speaker 2: often these people, some of them are violent naturally, but
Speaker 2: often they're not. They've never done anything like this. It's
Speaker 2: a big deal for them. So and so that's that's
Speaker 2: the way I see it. And these things can happen
Speaker 2: over years, or they can happen over weeks. You know,
Speaker 2: cases of extreme timing where people have fested on these
Speaker 2: subjects for a long time and it's something just snaps
Speaker 2: them to move.
Speaker 1: That's given an understanding of the type of person that
Speaker 1: we're dealing with here some of the indicators that I've
Speaker 1: made some notes here at common sence, I suppose because
Speaker 1: the whole thing about law enforcement here is we want
Speaker 1: to prevent these or identify these before they carry out
Speaker 1: the acts. Expressions of violent ideation, threatening behavior, fascination with violence,
Speaker 1: social withdrawal. These are the type of things that are
Speaker 1: indicators if they behave mood changes. I'm looking through the
Speaker 1: whole list of them, and I find it fascinating. Preoccupation
Speaker 1: with personal grievances, substance abuse, preparation for violence, changes in routine,
Speaker 1: unsolved conflict or stresses. So what you were describing, these
Speaker 1: are all the things these are. That's the person that
Speaker 1: carries out these acts. These are the type of signposts
Speaker 1: that all signs that they could be going down that path.
Speaker 2: Is that correct? Yeah? Every case is different, and some
Speaker 2: of their things you list their present, sometimes they're not,
Speaker 2: so it's different combinations. The easiest way to sort of
Speaker 2: see it is to look at it from say the
Speaker 2: idea that if someone wakes up one day, yeah, and
Speaker 2: they decide to carry out an attack leading up to that,
Speaker 2: what what might you see? And the reason I mentioned
Speaker 2: the grieving grievance and the tipping point first is because
Speaker 2: they're often there. The grievance particularly is almost always there.
Speaker 2: So you're going to get people who have views that
Speaker 2: aren't necessarily going to do this, and you're also going
Speaker 2: to have people that have those views have a terrible
Speaker 2: time in their life, something happens, and they still don't
Speaker 2: do it. But my view has always been you should
Speaker 2: you should still consider that. If that's someone you're already
Speaker 2: concerned about and then they have a major life event
Speaker 2: or something happens you know, in the world or even
Speaker 2: locally that that's quite significant, then those are the moments
Speaker 2: that you should kind of check in with them and
Speaker 2: focus in on them. And so if someone you, a
Speaker 2: member of the public's got friend or family or something
Speaker 2: like that, then they should be concerned around those things.
Speaker 2: Because this is the idea of flash points. So you
Speaker 2: can't predict exactly who's going to go ahead and do this,
Speaker 2: but those moments are concern But then what you move
Speaker 2: into once they've decided, you move into this preparation phase.
Speaker 2: There's two parts of that really. One is this sort
Speaker 2: of physical preparation. So it's almost always a planned crime this,
Speaker 2: I mean, there are examples of where it's very spontaneous,
Speaker 2: but most of them there is an element of planning,
Speaker 2: often rudimentary because often the methods that are used are
Speaker 2: nowadays are kind of They might use a knife or
Speaker 2: a car or something kind of like that. But there
Speaker 2: is this planning phase, and so some of them will
Speaker 2: start to kind of look at where they're going to
Speaker 2: do it. They're going to pick somewhere to do it.
Speaker 2: They might look at kind of how many people are there?
Speaker 2: How can they get away with it? They might think
Speaker 2: about how important is that site? Is that going to
Speaker 2: get the attention that I want by doing this? It
Speaker 2: is often what this is also about. And then they're
Speaker 2: going to have to acquire a weapon of some sort
Speaker 2: if that's the way they're going to do it. So
Speaker 2: all those things take time and planning. Some of it's
Speaker 2: kind of obvious, but if you're sort of if you
Speaker 2: know that person and they'rever extreme, and then they start
Speaker 2: to kind of either talk about because some do just
Speaker 2: talk about it openly, and that's obviously a big flag,
Speaker 2: you know, a big red flag. The other thing that
Speaker 2: happens is that sometimes with this planning phase, they tend
Speaker 2: to kind of go off the radar. You know, they
Speaker 2: become very withdrawn. Suddenly they become secretive, they sort of
Speaker 2: disappear and they won't sort of tell anyone what they're
Speaker 2: up to.
Speaker 1: So these are the I call them indicators, I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if that's the right terminology, but type of indicators
Speaker 1: that people should look out for when, yeah, if they're
Speaker 1: concerned about someone going down this pathway. We're going to
Speaker 1: take a break now when we get back, because I
Speaker 1: know in the other discussions that we've had a big
Speaker 1: thing is about how we can minimize the risk associated
Speaker 1: with people like this. So let's talk more in depth
Speaker 1: about that the type of dig even deeper into the
Speaker 1: indicators ways of preventing this, and I think we're both
Speaker 1: in the grants will never be able to stop it completely.
Speaker 1: But it's not just law enforcement, it's everyone's invested in
Speaker 1: trying to reduce these type of the type of criminal acts.
Speaker 1: We'll be back shortly for part two.
Speaker 2: Okay, cheers,