The Last Word On Nothing

On July 31st, five women robbed a bank in Olympia, Washington. While one stood watch outside, four of them entered the bank wearing hoodies and dark stocking caps and wielding handguns. Inside, one stood guard, another called out the time in in five second intervals, while the remaining two leapt over the counter and stole the money.

The heist took 53 seconds. The five women left the bank, and ran into a nearby forest to get rid of their clothes and stolen handguns. Then they took a bus going West, back to where they lived, in a town called Aberdeen 60 miles outside of Olympia.

It took officials only a few weeks to catch the thieves. Several of them lived together, and in their home, officials found the blueprint they used to plan the heist. It wasn’t a map or a written list of instructions though. It was a copy of a movie called Set it Off, starring Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Vivica A. Fox and Kimberly Elise. The women had watched the movie several times to prepare for their heist, using it as a template.

The Set it Off case is a very clear example of what has come to be known as “copycat crime” — crimes that are inspired directly by a piece of media; a news report, a song, a movie. But there are other crimes that get called copycat crimes that aren’t nearly this clear cut. In 1996, three teenage boys murdered a classmate. In court, one of the boys said that Slayer’s songs had instructed them to find and kill a virgin. The murder has been called a copycat crime. In 1999, 12 year old Lionel Tate killed his playmate while mimicking moves he saw on TV wrestling shows. This has also been called a copycat crime. (Tate is also the youngest American citizen ever sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.) In 1966 the film The Battle of Algiers depicted a terrorist bombing campaign against the French in Algeria. Some have called modern al Qaeda terrorist actions copycat crimes based on the movie.

But does a murderer liking Slayer make their murder a copycat crime? Can crimes committed today be called copycats of a 50-year old film? What makes one thing a copycat crime, and another thing just a crime that happens to be like one of the thousands of crimes depicted by movies and songs and the news every year?

It turns out there is no answer to these questions because there is no good definition for what makes something a copycat crime. The term copycat crime was actually coined by the media, not criminologists. And those who study copycat crime don’t have a rubric with which to determine whether something fits the bill or not.

“What you’re dealing with once you get past the idea of copycat crime being real, is almost totally speculation,” says Ray Surette, a researcher at the University of Central Florida. Surette has written extensively about the history of copycat crime, from its earliest incarnation in the media to its more modern use by criminologists. But the lack of any real rules about what is and isn’t a copycat crime bothers him. “All we’re really throwing around is hypotheses, there’s a little bit of data, but most of it is extrapolation from a small number of cases. I wouldn’t stake my life on any of the conclusions right now.”

Take, for example, a case that recently got Surette riled up. He described a case in which there was a shooting in line for a movie that involved shooting. “It was written up as a copycat crime and I was going ballistic,” he says. A crime in a movie can’t have inspired a real life crime, he says, if the criminals hadn’t even seen the movie yet.

So Surette recently channeled this frustration and put together a rubric, a set of things that make up a copycat crime. His list involves seven indicators of a copycat crime, each worth one or two points. These include things like: time order (the crime has to be committed after the criminal has seen the media they are imitating), scene specificity (how close the criminal came to reenacting the scene they saw), and offender statements (if the criminal explicitly states that they copied a piece of media in their crime).

Using his rubric, Surette went through a list of 53 crimes that have been deemed copycats by the media. He scored each one using his rubric, and then divided a crime’s points by the total number of points possible to get a final score between zero and one. In the end, about 25 percent of the crimes he called “unsubstantiated” copycats, 35 percent were possible copycats, and 40 percent were “substantiated” copycats.

Here’s an example of how the system works. Some have called the Oklahoma City Bombing by Timothy McVeigh a copycat crime based on the movie Red Dawn. McVeigh did view the movie four times before he bombed the building (one point for time order and proximity). Later, in testimony, McVeigh did say things that reflected the attitudes of the main characters in the film (one point for theme consistency). But at no point did he talk about the movie in his testimony (zero points for “self-editing”) and he didn’t copy any particular scene from the movie (zero points for “scene specificity”). In the end, McVeigh nabbed two out of a total of nine possible points, giving him a copycat score of 0.222. Surrette wouldn’t call that a copycat crime.

But some of the elements in this rubric are a bit arbitrary. Take time proximity, how much time can pass between seeing a piece of media and committing a crime before your crime is no longer a copycat? In his paper, Surette puts that time difference at five years. If it has been more than five years since the offender viewed the media that they’re supposedly copying, Surrette says it doesn’t count.

Why five years? No real reason. “There’s no science behind that,” he says. “I didn’t want to make it so long. It could have been ten.” Surette says he redid his analysis of cases using this rubric with a two year cutoff, and it didn’t change much. He says he’s open to picking a different number, but that it can’t be too big. “The gap can’t go forever, otherwise you get into silliness.”

Surette admits this whole thing is a rough draft. “There’s a lot of flaws in that scoring thing, my main goal there was to try to think of it as a real world phenomenon that maybe we could study,” he says. “I’m perfectly open to additional factors, people testing different criteria.” But what he does want is for criminologists to come up with some way of separating true copycat crimes out from the rest of the crimes that happen each day.

And part of why he wants to get stricter about what does and doesn’t get called a copycat crime, is because true copycat crimes are really interesting. “There’s something really unique going on here, this fictional or news crime is forming and generating this set of crimes,” he says. That’s something worth studying. But it’s hard to study something you haven’t even defined.

And since it’s not well defined, there are still lots of unanswered questions about the motivations behind copycats. I asked Surrette whether movies or news were more likely to spawn copycats (I could see an argument either way—movies might seem more heroic and awesome, while news might make a crime feel within reach) and he told me no one has studied that. “The most honest answer I can give you is that I do not know and I would guess that nobody knows.” There are all sorts of questions like this about copycat crimes that remain unanswered. And researchers can’t even start to answer them if they still don’t have a definition for the thing they’re talking about.