| | | | IT’S NOT JUST good policing. Something else is afoot here. Newspapers have been filled with stories about how all of us—urban professionals, restaurant busboys, firemen, livery drivers, bankers, lawyers and even our political leaders—now constitute a class of walking wounded, people suffering from everything from mild sleeplessness to extreme cases of post-traumatic stress disorder. | |
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Watching the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center burn and then collapse has made many New Yorkers simply unable to get out of bed to go to work. It has made them wake up to a backfiring car in the middle of the night with immediate thoughts that the Empire State Building has been hit. It has made them question the contents of every Ryder truck they see. It has made them—hell, let’s drop the pretense, it has made me—too scared to function without fortifying doses of caffeine, lager or something even stronger.
The implication, of course, is that a large segment of the population is not working at full efficiency. So with crime reports down dramatically, I put two and two together (I was always good at math) and figured out that something revolutionary is occurring: Criminals are also too depressed to work.
“There is nothing about knocking off grocery stores that makes you immune to severe stress situations,” said Dennis Wenger, a Texas A&M professor who specializes in the sociology of natural disasters. “Just because someone engages in criminal behavior, doesn’t mean that he’s not a human being, subject to the same stresses as the rest of us.”
Wenger theorized that feelings of social altruism are even more powerful than the depression we’re all experiencing. Just as during a natural disaster, people are feeling attached to the greater community and, as such, are less likely to betray it.
“That’s why, despite the myth, looting is actually quite uncommon during disasters like hurricanes or an attack like the one on the World Trade Center that brings people together,” Wenger said. “There is a tremendous social pressure to be a good citizen. Selfish acts are condemned.”
Perhaps, but criminals are typically not the segment of the population that cares about societal norms. In fact, isn’t the point of the would-be criminal to stand in opposition to social cohesion?
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