Crime these days. The thing about any human interaction is, it produces data. That interaction is at times malevolent and unproductive, at times benign, at times constructive and at times destructive. Mathematically, the action-reaction states are all quantifiable in analysis. A lot of noise can be made about philosophy and development of data, the how and why, but analysis has the advantage of hindsight. When viewed from afar, trends can be seen that developed riots, war, peace, the seven wonders. All crime like all things human, is an interaction based on some level of data input and output, processed by the wetware we carry in a few pounds of gelatinous goo between our ears. Ray spent time staring at charts, at files, at data flows as though they held the keys to the problems he was solving, and barring a few very sparse outliers he was very often able to point back to causes of specific data forks that led to the path he’d followed for a solution. Sometimes it was obvious and sometimes it was messy. Psychology and neuroscience played the primary roles in solving a crime, but fairly rudimentary data analysis drove the majority of the process. The APD had been an early adopter of a data-driven crime fighting method modeled after NYPD’s CompStat accountability process. The idea is, a combination of analysis and intelligence will produce a heat map of crime in an area. Increasing patrols in those areas, sometimes in the form of uniformed officers doing traffic stops, sometimes in the form of undercover operations, often a mix of both, would cause crime in the areas to recede. Police presence will restore a sense of order. A theory, called the “broken windows theory,” suggests that areas that are run down with un-enforced statutes will slide into decay (a sure sign of neglect, broken windows in a building, would lead a criminal-minded observer to think the building and area around it are a haven for crime). Fixing the broken window was easier than fixing the decay of society.  The Austin PD increased traffic stops in certain areas, increased aerial surveillance and visibility, and started a rampant, codified collection of data on every crime reported in the city or action by the police. Crimes of certain kinds in certain areas dropped dramatically.
Crime is just data, and viewed dispassionately the data can be used to weave a story of a person who perpetrates a crime. That story can be used to locate people, and one of those people, in theory, is the criminal. Data, pure and simple. The very, very hard part was collecting the data, and even more difficult was detecting manipulation, sorting out lies and noise from the thread of truth. People well trained in the analysis of intelligence were very good at this. Detectives with years of experience were pretty darn good at it. Conspiracy minded radio listeners were absolutely terrible at it.

As Ray and Ed worked the court and the phones, the city started to hum with the news. The police had avoided having much of a camera presence when the body was removed, but the initial murmuring was that another body had been found. Another one! Hanging from a ceiling! One of the more efficient ways to spread information in a density of population is to deny the basis of the information from the people who are speaking about it. As the news is spread, novelty is added to the initial information, allowing each person spreading the story to become the storyteller, to become a novel source of information in a memetic blanket that starts weaving the second an observer is quoted. By the time the story of this latest body had spread down south Congress to the wait staff and pedicabs, the crime scene was straight out of a Hannibal Lector playbook: big, bloody, and scary as hell. Patrons at taco bars and pizza joints mulled over the motives. The words “serial” and “killer” were being strung together for the first time. From just two victims, a legend was being blogged.

The CS team were done with the preliminary work, so Ray and the ME’s rep, a young doctor that Ray had not yet worked with, went about the official pronouncement. The doctor had to cut through a layer of plastic near the neck, then near the right leg, to try and get a pulse at two arterial locations, but he wasn’t stupid. The cold of the body was evident through the gloves, rigor mortis already starting. The chief CS guy took photos as the ME and Ray cut the plastic off down the back, revealing the body of a young woman. A small amount of blood, carried in a chaotic capillary pattern across the wrinkled plastic, appeared to be caused by a single puncture wound near the right kidney. The body was rolled over onto a gas-impermeable body bag, and the doctor and Ray recoiled. The woman’s face was a grotesque mess of flesh. The woman’s face was covered by a pig’s face. It had been stapled into place with six very heavy brass staples. The ME couldn’t begin to guess time of death, but pronounced the victim and stumbled away. Ray, using a slim wooden foam-tipped Q-tip, probed around the edges of the pig face, where it met the woman’s flesh. The pig’s face wasn’t just stapled over the woman’s. It was the woman’s face; the killer had peeled the woman’s face off, and attached the pig’s. Ray stood up, shaking his head. 

A snippet of my SublimeText editor window. The bit on the right is a zoomed-out minimap of the story so far. So far, it’s OK. Not great. But it might sell, goddamn it.

When the murders started, the city was just entering a small spring heat wave.

That’s how it’ll start. I’ll have to see what the rest of it ends up as, but so far, I’ve put a few thousand words around the idea that murder can save a city. 

It’s just fiction.

I’m not much for cognitive therapy, in that much of it sounds like magic. I
am, however, certain that the continued polarization of our political
selves is the result of cognitive distortion brought on by an unwillingness
to submit to any will other than God’s.

Thus people voting and believing things that are not in their best interest
(and are oftentimes in their worst interest).

The question, then, is how to best stop the exploitation of this distortion
by politics, marketing, and religion?