Inspired by the discussion of the sniper situation,i wondered why everytime there is a profile released the ethnicity is white.
Is there any reason that caucasians are predisposed?
I know this post could sound like a trolling,but i’ve wondered about this.
What about the Atlanta Child-Killer, Wayne Williams (terrorized Atlanta from 1979-1981)? One of the most notorious serial killers, and not Caucasian.
Maybe i should have been clearer,sorry.
But what i was asking is why do profilers always say caucasian,is there any reason behind it?
Not all are white. There are African and Latino serial killers as well. Here is more information.
http://darkday.tripod.com/q-z/williamswayne.html
http://darkday.tripod.com/q-z/sidyno.html
http://darkday.tripod.com/q-z/resendiz.html
I would imagine that there is a potential racial/racist component culturally in not detecting black serial killers, in that a black serial killer operating in a poor black inner city neighborhood may well escape detection due to the background noise of urban violence prevalent in some areas and police not being pre-dsposed to really dig further than simply chalking it up to a culture of violence and moving on.
And let’s not forget our Asian friends: Charles Ng, S.F. area, ca. 1985.
If profilers usually say “Caucasian,” it just means that they’re going to be wrong a certain percentage of the time. Still, if you’re trying to establish a profile based on meager evidence, guessing “Caucasian” makes some sense, since Caucasians outnumber everyone else by a fair margin.
Maybe so, but “ordinary” murderers are disproportionally Black, but this does not apply to seriel killers. I’m not sure why. Maybe a Black man would have more difficulty traveling around the country and enticing women, who are disproportionally white, to trust him to the point where he is in a position to kill them.
One point to be brought up about the Wayne Williams investigation - the profilers DIDN’T say caucasian. That case is often pointed to as a “success story” for profiling. The profilers had decided the murderer was black, mostly because the murders were happening in predominantly black neighborhoods and it appeared that the murderer was somebody who fit into those neighborhoods, and whose appearance would not cause comment.
Profilers also draw a connection between victim type and the killer; one of the sort of tenets of profiling (at least in the beginning) was that serial killers tend to choose victims of their own race. As profiling is not an exact science, there are plenty of cases that disprove this axiom.
Galen probably has a point that white guys inclined to such activity have some situational advantages over their black counterparts. All else being equal, they have more financial resources, more mobility (many inner city residents won’t have a car, which seems to be a key element of many of these crimes), probably better education (so as to avoid detection), etc. And, as galen noted, being a Ted Bundy or something is much easier when you are initially perceived as “unthreatening.”
I read a theory by some sociologist (I think in a book by Elliott Leyton), which I take with more than a grain of salt, to the effect that sociopathic behavior is most common among groups that are just outside the margins of “success” or power (as opposed to those far outside the margins). They, he theorized, would feel most acutely the deprivation and unfairness of being denied what they wanted in life, because they were close enough to taste success (or once had tasted it) but now couldn’t get it. His empirical “evidence” was that in past centuries, sociopaths had been nobles/aristocrats, or demi-aristocrats, especially during the period when the aristocracy/feudal-derived system was declining in power (his sole examples if I remember were Vlad and the Marechal of Reyes) – ergo, they felt marginalized and lashed out (I really wonder about this theory – doesn’t it seem equally likely that these nobles, no matter how “threatened,” did what they did just because they could (still) get away with it?). Fast forward several hundred years and the marginalized group is lower middle class white guys – too poor to be part of the white power structure, resentful of their exclusion from it, and feeling left behind by history as minorities, etc. “take their jobs,” etc. The author made much of the fact that Bundy was illegitimate, never quite as well-off as his classmates, etc.
While I have huge problems with this psychological determinism approach, and also with Leyton’s extremely tenuous linkages to alleged historical patterns of sociopathic behavior, there may be a kernel of truth to the notion that lower class white guys find themselves resentful and well-situated to act on that resentment by virtue of being “mainstream” enough to fit in, and to know the system (and how to game it to some degree), and to see the benefits the upper mainstream types enjoy, but excluded from the full fruits of what they see as their birthright, i.e., material and romantic success. Many blacks, on this theory, are just so far beyond the pale of material success or the mainstream in America that the festering resentment and desire for revenge doesn’t set in in the first place – they never find themselves thinking “That could’ve/should’ve been me [who got rich/got the girl, etc.].”
Early Out’s cynical theory may be the most accurate, when you come down to it. “Profiling” has proven to have a large witch doctor component, with the quasi-scientific terminology and aura masking the fact that the profiles at best combine a core of obvious common sense/statistical “best guesses” with speculative (and often wrong) attempts at psychoanalysis. A lot of killers will be white and male and a bit of a loner because most Americans are white and more men than women are violent and loners have more time and opportunity to conceal crimes. Likewise it was probably reasonable (and did not require a PhD in profiling) to predict that whoever sent the anthrax letters “had access to scientific equipment.” I have no problem with this sort of commonsensical predictive approach. It’s when the profiling is presented as some magical or sophisticated science or art form, or when it goes beyond identifying patterns of past criminal behavior to speculating on motives and psychological portraits, that it becomes ridiculous. For one of the more howlingly bad examples of the romanticizing of “scientific” profiling, see Carr’s “The Alienist” – remarkable for its embrace, at a date well after even many prior proponents had shamefacedly recognized the simplistic and wrongheaded nature of vast swaths of 20th century psychoanalytic theory, of the idea that quasi-Freudian principles could be applied to deduce ineluctably the identity of the killer.
Don’t forget Coral Watts, soon being paroled to a neighborhood near to you.
South Africa is for whatever reason at least as bad off as the US and Europe where the prevalance and “body count” of serial killers is concerned. In keeping with the demographics of that nation, the overwhelming proportion of its serial killers are black. (This doesn’t count the serial killers employed by the former government, of course.)
Profiling is more a matter of statistics and common sense rather than science.
There was a latino serial killer operating in Texas a few years back. Angel Ramirez?
Angel Resendez, “The railroad Killer”. I think you’re conflating with Richard Ramirez, the LA “Night Stalker”, or with an alias, “Rafael Ramirez”, used by Resendez. Both are examples of Latino serial killers:
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial2/railroad/
http://www3.sympatico.ca/bob.carle/ramirez.htm
Still, most serial killers by far are white males. Pointing out exceptions doesn’t change that. I watched a program on Discovery (I think it was) a while back, and they didn’t have any answers. Almost certainly cultural, though.
Peace,
mangeorge
There have been plenty of multiple murderers in this country (U.S.) of ethnicities other than white. Hop on over to The Crime Library and have a look around.
Nevertheless, at this point more are white, and whites are a majority of this population. Milton De La Warre points out a different situation in South Africa, and in Mexico multiple murderers are predominantly latino. This doesn’t seem like too tough a nut to crack.
If one is making the argument that “Caucasian genes” are at fault, then most African Americans and Latinos (entirely cultural categories) also carry at least some European genes…its entirely cultural.
I assume the majority of such killers in every country belong to the majority group. As someone else pointed out, minorities of whatever type are often under extra scrutiny. A black man driving with a windowless white van, who ‘assists’ stranded motorists or attempts to pick up hitchikers, and has an expressed interest in guns would probably catch much more attention than a middle class white man who can easily explain away such things.
I was living in Texas at the time of those murders, and IIRC, most news stations referred to him as “Rafael Resendez Ramirez.”
Er, as an addendum to my last post:
most news stations referred to him as “Rafael Resendez Ramirez,” which is probably where the names started getting confused.
Angel Maturino Resendez was going by Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, apparently an uncles name, for most of the period during which he killed. That was what media referred to him as until his true name was learned. My next door neighbor and law school buddy had an internship at the Mexican Consulate during our last year of law school, and he and one of the Consulate attorneys had to go look in on him after he turned down any appeal of his death sentence. Talked to him for about five hours.
FBI agents I’ve talked to have said any time you have a serial killer, you can say that it’s a white male between the ages of 25 and 45 and be right 95 percent of the time. Other races have their share, but serial killers seem to be disproportionatley white. I’m not sure if there’s any agreement as to why.
Probably the same reason that when one says “Gang banger”, one thinks “black”.
Yeah, I was thinking of Angel Resendez.
As others have stated, serial killers in South Africa and Mexico are usually black and latino, respectively, so it would seem that (for whatever social or psychological reasons) serials killers tend to be of the majority population.