Crime

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On Monday, two days after Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher murdered his girlfriend and then committed suicide, I wrote about domestic violence and the NFL. In that post, I looked at a San Diego Union-Tribune database of NFL arrest records and searched for incidents domestic violence or sexual assault. I found that 21 of 32 NFL teams, at one point this year, had employed a player with a domestic violence or sexual assault charge on his record.

That’s a pretty striking factoid, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything statistically. I estimated that about 2 percent of rostered NFL players in 2012 have been charged with an intimate violence crime. (This estimate assumes the standard 53-man roster.) How do NFL players stack up to the public at large?

The data are inconclusive. The most recent year for which the Bureau of Justice Statistics has comprehensive arrest data is 2010. That year, according to the Union-Tribune database, 8 NFL players were charged with intimate violence crimes, which equates to 4.7 players out of 1000. (The numbers are similar for 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009.) According to the BJS Arrest Data Analysis Tool, in 2010, approximately 600 out of every 100,000 men—6 out of 1,000—were arrested for “other assaults,” a category that includes but is not limited to non-rape intimate violence crimes. This includes all men, not just those in the NFL age bracket; it also includes all assaults, not just intimate violence assaults.

There’s no single source that contains indisputable numbers on domestic violence and its perpetrators. (Discrepancies can occur based on survey methodology and other factors.) The recent Bureau of Justice Statistics report “Intimate Partner Violence, 1993-2010” found that, from 2009 to 2010, 5.9 out of 1,000 women fell victim to intimate violence crimes—defined as rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, or simple assault committed by a current or former spouse or significant other. (The data were derived from the National Crime Victimization Survey, the most authoritative source in existence for information about the nature of crime incidents.) Two out of 1000 married women were victims of those sorts of crimes. However, the report also includes incidents that were never reported to the police. Another BJS report found that about 46 percent of intimate partner crimes from 2006-2010 were never reported.

Obviously, the NFL arrests database doesn’t include crimes that weren’t reported to the police, which makes it hard to compare NFL arrests against the NCVS statistics. What has been shown in research is that professional athletes are much less likely to be convicted of intimate violence crimes than are non-athletes. In a 1997 study, Northeastern University’s Jeffrey Benedict and Alan Klein found that the athletes in their sample who were charged with sexual assault were only convicted 31 percent of the time, compared with a 54 percent conviction rate for the general population. In 1995, Maryann Hudson at the Los Angeles Times found that athletes charged with domestic violence were only convicted 36 percent of the time, compared with a 77 percent general conviction rate. In a 2010 Harvard Law Review article, Bethany Withers wrote that “conviction rates for athletes are astonishingly low compared to the arrest statistics. Though there is evidence that the responsiveness of police and prosecution to sexual assault complaints involving athletes is favorable, there is an off-setting pro-athlete bias on the part of juries.”

Does the NFL have a domestic violence problem? Perhaps not, if you strictly interpret that question to mean, Can you prove conclusively that the rate of domestic violence charges against NFL players exceed the national average? But that’s an excessively narrow interpretation. The NFL does have a problem in the inconsistency with which it treats offenders and minimizes their alleged crimes. NFL executives and coaches talk tough on domestic violence but don’t really follow through. On Monday, I mentioned that 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh told his players that he will forgive them for anything except striking a woman. Well, in 2008, Ahmad Brooks literally punched a woman in the face, allegedly giving her a black eye and causing her to black out. Brooks is now starting for the 49ers. In a recent SI.com story about Brooks’ outstanding play, the assault is referred to euphemistically as “past troubles.” (For what it's worth, the woman Brooks allegedly punched was a stranger he encountered on the street, so let's count this as "violence against women" rather than "intimate violence.")

Teams have an incentive to hire and play the best players, regardless of how they behave off the field. The courts don’t seem to be doling out justice, either. So who’s going to take responsibility?

It needs to be Commissioner Roger Goodell, who recently expressed the need for the NFL “to do some things to combat this problem.” What should he do? In the next CBA, the NFL should codify specific player behavior guidelines that establish clear disciplinary consequences for domestic violence.

Of course, you don’t want to subject a player to unwarranted punishment if the charges against him are eventually dismissed. But in her Harvard Law Review article, Bethany Withers suggests that disciplinary bodies can examine 911 calls and police incident reports to establish a pattern of abusive behavior. She notes that the police had made seven domestic dispute-related visits to former Broncos wide receiver Brandon Marshall’s house before he first stood trial. Marshall was eventually acquitted in that case “despite the fact that seven photographs of the mouth, face, neck, eye, and thigh of Rasheedah Watley, the alleged victim, taken on two different occasions were entered as evidence of Marshall’s guilt,” Withers writes. This March, Marshall was accused of punching a woman at a nightclub. (His attorney claimed in May that the receiver has been cleared of those charges, but the NYPD disagreed with that characterization.) [Update, 10 p.m.: The NYPD has confirmed to me that the Marshall case is still ongoing.]

What sort of punishment has Marshall gotten from the NFL? The receiver was suspended for three games by Goodell in 2008, but it was reduced to one game on appeal. To put that into perspective, players who take Adderall get suspended for four games. Does the NFL have a problem with violence against women? From where I sit, the answer is obvious.

Crime is Slate’s new crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

On Saturday, Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher shot his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins to death. Then he drove to the Chiefs’ practice facility, where, after thanking two of his coaches and the team’s general manager for all they had done for him, he shot himself in the head.

The Chiefs’ team captains and the NFL decided that Sunday afternoon’s game with the Carolina Panthers would proceed as normal, and, as an acknowledgement of the tragedy, the game began with a moment of silence for victims of domestic violence. It was a nice gesture, but considering the NFL’s serious domestic violence problem, it was sort of an empty one.

The San Diego Union-Tribune hosts a tremendously helpful database of NFL player arrests since 2000. I went through it last night, and determined that of the 32 NFL teams, 21 of them have this year had at least one player who’s been charged at some point with domestic violence or sexual assault. (I should note that some of these charges were withdrawn, and some of the players were acquitted. I should also note that charges are often withdrawn in domestic violence cases, even when the accused is almost certainly guilty. I should finally note that even though this database is thorough, it is likely not totally comprehensive.)

Each team in the AFC East has at least one player who qualifies: injured Jets receiver Santonio Holmes, arrested for assaulting his daughter’s mother; Patriots wideout Julian Edelman, charged with grabbing a stranger’s vagina during a Halloween party; Dolphins linemen Tony McDaniel and Randy Starks, arrested for domestic battery and assault, respectively; and Bills linebacker Shawne Merriman, who in 2009 was charged with viciously choking MySpace celebrity Tila Tequila.

The AFC North is similarly well represented, with Ravens linebacker Albert McClellan, Steelers linebacker James Harrison, Bengals tight end Richard Quinn, and Browns defensive end Frostee Rucker all having domestic violence charges on their records. In the NFC East, Cowboys receiver Dez Bryant was charged with attacking his mother, while Giants Michael Boley and Rocky Bernard were accused of throwing their significant others into a wall and a glass divider, respectively. (“We don't condone any kind of domestic violence of any kind in any way,” said Giants GM Jerry Reese after signing the two players. “But Michael Boley does all kinds of community service and people never talk about that.”)

The NFC West includes players like Rams offensive lineman Quinn Ojinnaka, arrested for throwing his wife down the stairs during an argument about Facebook, and Seahawks linebacker Leroy Hill, charged with attacking his live-in girlfriend. Earlier this year, 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh told his team that “we can do anything in the world and we can come and talk to him and he’ll forgive us except put our hands on women. If you put your hand on a woman then you’re done in his book.” But apparently that book contains exceptions for Perrish Cox, accused of rape, and Ahmad Brooks, who in 2008 punched a woman in the face.

The only blameless division is the AFC South, which, as far as I can tell, harbors no accused abusers in its ranks. (It is, however, the home of Jaguars punter Bryan Anger, who, if his name is any indication, will probably explode any day now, probably at teammate Guy Whimper.)

There are approximately 1700 active players in the NFL, and by my count, about 2 percent of them have faced abuse or violence charges. I’m not sure how this compares to the general population, though I’d be interested to find out. I do know that, according to a very recent report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the overall national rate of intimate partner violence declined by 64 percent from 1994 to 2010. I would be very, very surprised if the NFL is matching this trend.

It’s easy to blame this on football itself, a game in which participants hit people for money, regularly self-medicate, and work themselves up into violent frenzies. But I think it’s stupid to say that football causes players to become abusive; after all, the vast majority of NFL players don’t take their work home with them. Last month, Craig Stevens of Northeastern University’s Sport in Society group reviewed much of the literature on the topic of male athletes and violence and concluded that there was no definitive proof that contact sports foster violent behavior.

But football can attract violent people, many of whom lack the skills to work through their anger. Many of the NFL players charged with domestic violence had traumatic-sounding childhoods. Washington Redskins tackle Jammal Brown was charged with spousal abuse in 2006; while he was growing up, Brown’s mother died, his sisters dropped out of high school, and his brother went to prison for drug trafficking. Packers linebacker Erik Walden, arrested last year for assaulting his girlfriend, faced horrible trauma as a kid, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “His dad dying of a stroke when he was 10. His cousin stabbed to death in drunken fury when he was 12. His grandmother passing away.”

After the Jovan Belcher murder/suicide, there’s been a lot of talk about making more and better counseling services available to NFL players. And certainly, Commissioner Roger Goodell has made clear his goal of reducing domestic violence in the league. "We are going to do some things to combat this problem because some of the numbers on DUIs and domestic violence are going up and that disturbs me," he told CBS Sports’ Mike Freeman earlier this summer. "When there's a pattern of mistakes, something has got to change."

But what Goodell has done to address this pattern as of now is unclear. Earlier this year, the commissioner suspended Saints defensive end Will Smith for his role in the team’s “bounty program.” (Smith has continued to play while the suspension is under appeal.) But he faced no league sanction when, in 2010, he was charged with domestic battery after allegedly grabbing his wife by the hair during an argument outside a nightclub. Though he was indicted by a grand jury in 2011, the charges against Smith were dismissed this March when he performed community service, went to domestic violence counseling sessions, and wrote an apology letter to the police.

Hopefully Will Smith got the help he needs. And perhaps the case of Belcher and Kasandra Perkins will lead other NFL players to seek counseling—and for the NFL to take action to make sure they do.

Crime is Slate’s new crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

On Jan. 17, 2011, a habitual felon named Joseph June was riding his bike down the Gulf Coast Highway in Escambia County, Fla., when a police car pulled up behind him. Officer Jason Von Ansbach Young got out of the car and initiated a conversation. As Young later explained it, while he had no reason to suspect that June was doing anything illegal, he hadn’t seen the man before and wanted to make his acquaintance. As they talked, June started fidgeting—he had a pocketknife on his person, he explained. The officer conducted a search, and found crack cocaine in June’s shirt pocket. In Florida, cocaine possession is a third-degree felony, and Escambia County judges aren’t inclined toward leniency for 64-year-old African-American career criminals. June was sentenced to the maximum five years in prison.

Monday, Florida’s First District Court of Appeal affirmed June’s conviction, denying his argument that the cocaine was seized in an illegal stop-and-frisk. In his opinion, Judge Joseph Lewis found that Young followed protocol: “Officer Young initially began a consensual encounter with Appellant. Officer Young pulled his patrol car behind Appellant while he was riding his bicycle, and never ordered him to stop, but merely engaged in a conversation with him.” Once June started acting suspicious, though, Officer Young had reason to initiate a search.

June’s case didn’t get any media attention, which isn’t surprising. There’s nothing new about a fidgety black guy getting caught with cocaine and sent away for a long time. June wasn’t even one of those non-violent offenders you hear prison reformers talk about—he had been arrested at least twice before on weapons charges. It’s not as if they’re locking up Bubbles.

But what interests me about this case is the way the appeals court characterized the initial contact between June and Young as a “consensual encounter.” The Florida Supreme Court classifies police encounters into three distinct levels: consensual, investigatory, and arrest. A consensual encounter is one into which each party enters willingly—a beat cop and a storekeeper exchanging greetings, for instance. It can be terminated by either party at any time with no consequences. You can’t initiate a search during a consensual encounter, and you can’t initiate an investigatory encounter without “a well-founded, articulable suspicion of criminal activity.”

The idea of a consensual encounter is a nice one, conjuring an image of lovers sneaking away for some mutually fulfilling afternoon delight. But, in reality, a police officer who pursues a “consensual” conversation is often just looking to screw you. As Janice Nadler and J.D. Trout note in their fascinating paper “The Language of Consent in Police Encounters,” many consensual engagements are pretexts for less-consensual behavior. “The police officer’s main purpose is to get information about what the person is doing, and get permission to do something else, like search their person, house, car, bags, etc.,” they write.

Police officers don’t just initiate conversations because they’re bored and want to talk sports with a stranger. (That’s what call-in shows are for.) They stop you because they can generally tell if you’re suspicious or “up to something,” and because they know the average person doesn’t feel they’re in a position to decline a conversation with a cop. Although courts tend to interpret consensuality based on surface-level cues—whether the police officer was polite, for instance—there’s always more going on. The unspoken power dynamics in a police/civilian encounter will generally favor the police, unless the civilian is a local sports hero, the mayor, or a giant who is impervious to bullets.

As Nadler and Trout write:

When a citizen summons the police, police presence is a welcome relief. But when officers approach uninvited, it is seldom a happy event for the citizen. Without a clear idea of where this encounter is going and how it will turn out, a citizen would feel irresponsible to treat this exchange like any other. People know that they should be courteous to police, that police carry guns and handcuffs, that they make mistakes that can cause you harm, and that additional police are just a radio call away.

In other words, there’s a vast gulf between the legal and practical definitions of the word consensual. I’d argue that no reasonable person would have refused Young’s invitation to stop. It’s possible that Young is naturally ebullient, and that he stopped his car because he wanted to swap restaurant tips or gab about the weather. But it’s more likely that he saw a black guy riding a bike and figured he was probably up to no good.

The fact that June was up to no good is irrelevant. Most people who are stopped by the cops aren’t doing anything illegal. In New York City, for example, the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy specifies that cops are only allowed to stop someone if, just like in Florida, they have an articulable suspicion that he or she is involved in criminal activity. But of the 685,724 police stops initiated in 2011, 605,328 of them found absolutely nothing. That’s almost a 90 percent whiff rate. Either the NYPD is staffed by a bunch of Mr. Magoos, or the police are violating the rules of the stop-and-frisk program pretty egregiously. But it’s hard for a citizen to challenge an improper stop and frisk, because any his-word-against-yours system favors the guy with the gun and the badge.

As Nadler and Trout explain, most social interactions proceed according to implicitly understood rules, and there are unspoken potential penalties for violating those rules. When your boss greets you with a paternal clap on the shoulder, you know you’re not supposed to reciprocate by pinching his cheek. When a police officer initiates a conversation, you know you’re not supposed to run away.

“By ignoring the pragmatic features of the police-citizen encounter,” Nadler and Trout write, “judges are engaging in a systematic denial of the reality of the social meaning underlying these encounters, and are thereby constructing a collective legal myth designed to support current police practices in the ‘war on drugs.’ ”

And that’s the point. Florida’s drug laws are harsh, and cops have been tasked with making drug arrests. They stop black men because they expect them to be carrying drugs. The strategy here is clear: Florida is making it harder for you to carry drugs by making it easier for the police to stop you for any reason. There’s nothing consensual about that.

*************

Thus ends the first week of my indeterminate sentence as Slate’s crime blogger--a week rife with erotic cannibals, lottery grifters, and inept job applicants. Thanks for sticking with me so far. I’ll improve eventually. Email me at justintrevett@fastmail.fm with comments, tips, questions, complaints, or mash notes. I read everything, and try to respond to as much as I can.

Name: Dominick Pelletier

Crime: Possession of child pornography.

Fatal mistakes: Misunderstanding the “Investigation” part of “Federal Bureau of Investigation”; believing that honesty is always the best policy.

The circumstances: On Aug. 29, 2008—his birthday—Pelletier interviewed for a job with the FBI. During the interview, Pelletier volunteered that he had once done research on child pornography as part of a graduate school project. As the interview progressed, Pelletier revealed to the incredulous agents that he had child pornography on his home computer, that he possibly had hardcore child pornography on his home computer, and that he had “inadvertently” created child pornography by filming himself having sex with an underage girl. Not only did Pelletier volunteer all this information, he apparently went home thinking he was still a candidate for the job: Upon leaving, he inquired if “this was going to slow down the application process.”

Yeah, it sort of did. Earlier this year, Pelletier was convicted of one count of possession of child pornography and sentenced to 80 months in federal prison with no possibility of parole. Last week, the Seventh Circuit affirmed Pelletier’s conviction. The opening of Judge Michael Kanne’s tremendously entertaining opinion is worth quoting in full:

Federal investigative agents will tell you that some cases are hard to solve. Some cases require years of effort—chasing down false leads and reigning in flighty witnesses. Others require painstaking scientific analysis, or weeks of poring over financial records for a hidden clue. And some cases are never solved at all—the right witness never comes forward, the right lead never pans out, or the right clue never turns up.

This is not one of those cases.

Indeed.

Now, on to the alternative-history part of this feature, where we examine how Dominick Pelletier might have done things differently.

How he could’ve been a lot smarter: He could have avoided downloading child porn entirely, instead doing his grad school research on how to succeed at job interviews.

How he could’ve been a little smarter: “The pornography was downloaded by my identical twin brother, who also has the same name as me.”

How he could’ve been a little dumber: “Not only did I download child pornography, I made it into a T-shirt, which, as you can see, I am wearing today.”

How he could’ve been a lot dumber: “I actually brought enough T-shirts for everyone, and I’d feel a lot more comfortable if you all put them on right now.”

Ultimate Dumbness Ranking (UDR): “Child porn downloader applies for FBI job” is the horrifying sex-crime equivalent of “Overweight burglar gets stuck in chimney.” I’ll give him 8 out of 10 on the UDR scale, a loose metric that I just made up.

With this evening’s Powerball jackpot at an unprecedented $550 million (and rising), lots of people are dreaming of what they’d do if they won the money. Others are dreaming about how to steal that money. Here’s an FAQ for those of you with theft on your minds.

Will I win the lottery?

No.

Can I rig the lottery?

You can try, but it’ll require a lot of advance planning, and you will probably be caught. In 1980, Nick Perry, the host of Pennsylvania’s televised lottery drawings, conspired with several other people to rig the Daily Number game. The winning numbers were drawn via Ping-Pong balls sucked out of an air machine; Perry and his gang tampered with the balls so that certain numbers were more likely to rise to the top, and then bet heavily on the favored  numbers. (The winning combination was 6-6-6; people eventually called the scheme the “Triple Six Fix.”) Though they won $3.5 million, their triumph was short-lived—the heavy betting on certain number combinations raised suspicions, and Perry was eventually arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison. So that’s the bad news. On the positive side, David Stern rigs the NBA draft lottery every damn year and hasn’t yet been caught. So there’s still hope!

Can I alter my ticket to make it look like I won the lottery?

If you are adept with computers, then maybe. Richard Knowlton ran the computer system for the Kansas Lottery; in 2000, he was caught using those computers to turn dozens of losing scratch tickets into $63,000 worth of winning tickets. Knowlton claimed that he did so to highlight flaws in the lottery’s security system, which is perhaps why he was only sentenced to 60 days in jail. This is a key point: If you are going to try to falsify your ticket, it helps to be a white-hat hacker who is doing so in order to prove a point.

Otherwise, altering your ticket is a horrible idea, and you should only attempt to redeem a fake ticket at a convenience store where the computers are down and the clerks are of subnormal intelligence. Attempting to falsify the numbers on the face of the ticket won’t work, because the real data is generally encoded elsewhere on the ticket. Of course, this hasn’t stopped people from trying. Last year, a Houston man claimed to have won a Texas Lottery scratch-and-win game that would pay him $1,000 per week for the rest of his life. He was lying: According to KHOU, “a ‘5’ and a ‘4’ had been cut out and put into different positions on the ticket to make it look like a winner. The investigator said the numbers were secured with Scotch tape.” This raises another key point: If you’re going to try to forge a winning lottery ticket, don’t use Scotch tape.

Can I grift the eventual winner?

Yes. Earlier this week, I mentioned Jack Whittaker, the West Virginia man who won a $314.9 million Powerball jackpot, which promptly ruined his life. Whittaker started flashing his cash in places where he shouldn’t; he and his family turned to drink and drugs. In a 2005 article for GQ, Paige Williams writes about how one day Whittaker was “another respectable old dude in a cowboy hat living his West Virginia life, and the next he was sitting on a curb outside a titty bar, complaining to the cops that an ex-stripper named Misty and her boyfriend drugged his cocktail, busted out the window of his truck, and made off with a half-million of his dollars.” We’ve all been there.

Whittaker’s an extreme example, but plenty of lottery winners become overwhelmed by their good fortune, making them extremely susceptible to thieves and con artists. Curtis Sharp, dubbed the “Five Million Dollar Man” after winning that amount in the New York Lottery in 1982, was a larger-than-life character who couldn’t give his money away fast enough. “I had a guy who walked with a limp, and he wanted me to give him money for a house,” Sharp remembered in Matthew Sweeney’s book The Lottery Wars. “We found out this man owned three houses. But here comes ol’ softie Curtis. People just try to get you when you are friendly, so you’ve got to be careful and start screening people, which I don’t like doing.”

Sometimes, you can fleece the winners before they know they’ve won. In 2009, a man named Willis Willis went to a Texas convenience store to see if any of his Mega Millions tickets were winners. The clerk, Pankaj Joshi, determined that one of them was a million-dollar winner; Joshi promptly stole the ticket, claimed the jackpot for himself, and fled to Nepal. Willis eventually got some of the money back, and was remarkably sanguine about the whole experience, telling Joshi to “have a nice day, wherever you are.” Probably in Nepal, spending down $600,000 of somebody else’s money, living the lottery grifter’s dream.

Last week, the FBI announced the capture of Jose “Joe” Luis Saenz, an alleged gang member and murderer who, since 2009, had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Saenz was captured in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he had been living above a beauty parlor. According to the AP, Saenz had gone to great lengths to disguise his identity: losing weight, removing tattoos, disfiguring his fingerprints. But it’s unclear whether he was able to alter his fat, distinctive baby face.

That baby face may have helped Saenz get on the list in the first place. Ever since the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list was created in 1950, many have assumed that the list contains the worst of the worst—that it’s something like a power ranking for crooks. And, indeed, the list has contained fugitives who’ve loomed large in the public imagination: Osama bin Laden, James Earl Ray, Whitey Bulger, Eric Rudolph, Ramzi Yousef.

But in a New York Times article this June, Michael S. Schmidt noted that "bureau officials have also tried to select other dangerous fugitives who may have been hiding in plain sight but could be recognized by the public because they have distinctive physical features." In other words, a weird-looking fugitive is more likely to make the list than a criminal without distinctive marks.

This makes sense. The whole point of the list is to motivate the public to help identify fugitives, and it’s easier to identify someone whose face is hard to forget. Joe Saenz has the sort of broad cake-eater’s face that would stick in your mind if you saw it, and might trigger recognition when you saw that face on a wanted poster.

The FBI issued its first “wanted poster” in 1919, in an effort to catch a runaway soldier named William N. Bishop. (Bishop had four vaccination scars and a “massive lower jaw.”) The Most Wanted list was created after a wire service reporter in need of column copy asked the FBI for a list of its ten worst fugitives. The subsequent story generated enormous positive publicity, and prompted J. Edgar Hoover to institutionalize the format; in 1950, the bureau issued an official list of ten notorious murderers, kidnappers, escape artists, and car thieves. An American legend was born.

The list soon became a valuable publicity tool, a way for the FBI to increase the heat on those criminals who had proven the most elusive, like folk-hero bank robber Willie Sutton and noted cattle rustler Chester Davenport, who was caught two days after being added to the list. (He was arrested while milking a cow; it is unclear whether the cow had tipped anyone off.) Fugitives generally stay on the list until they are caught or confirmed dead. When a spot opens, as this 2007 Explainer describes, the FBI field offices nominate potential replacements. (“To get one of your fugitives on the Top Ten list, you were a salesperson,” an ex-FBI agent was quoted as saying in The Encyclopedia of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. “You had to present this person in the most negative light.”) In order to make the list, they have to be considered dangerous, elusive, and vulnerable to nationwide publicity. It also helps if they’re ugly.

Eric Toth, an alleged child pornographer who took Osama bin Laden’s spot on the list earlier this year, is a tall, thin dude with a weirdly shaped head and a distinctive mole under his eye. Rape and murder suspect Fidel Urbina, added to the list on June 5, has acne scars on his right cheek. Alexis Flores, wanted for the abduction, rape, and murder of a five-year-old girl, has scars on his forehead and right cheek. Jason Derek Brown, on the list since 2007, is a suspected robber and murderer who sort of looks like Sean Penn. 

These fugitives are dangerous, to be sure, but they’re hardly the sort of supervillains a layman might expect to find on the Ten Most Wanted list. Then again, “A Few Notorious Louts and Several Other Dangerous Guys with Visible Scars” doesn’t have the same ring to it. Eric Toth is a bad guy, undoubtedly, but it’s hard to say that he’s worse than Randy Yager, a motorcycle gang leader wanted on racketeering charges involving murder and arson, or Daniel Hiers, an ex-cop wanted for molesting a teenager and murdering his wife. Hiers and Yager are both on the U.S. Marshals’ 15 Most Wanted List, a similar rundown containing totally different personnel. Both men are relatively normal looking.

If I know tabloids like I think I do, someone deep in the bowels of the New York Post is currently a few hours into a mockup of a Year of the Cannibal spread. This fall, NYPD officer Gilberto Valle was dubbed the “cannibal cop” after his arrest for allegedly plotting to kidnap young women for the purposes of roasting them in an oven. Last week, a New Jersey man named Robert Mucha was charged with enticing a minor into sexual activity; he was also accused of chatting online about his desire to abduct, molest, and cook children. (Mucha told law enforcement that he “regularly masturbates to a fantasy in which he bastes a two-year-old boy in barbecue sauce and then skewers, cooks, and eats the child like a Thanksgiving turkey.”) And earlier this summer, a Florida puppeteer named Ronald Brown was arrested after talking online about raping, murdering, and eating young boys. (Brown once worked for a Christian Television Network program called Joy Junction.)

What’s behind this wave of sexualized cannibalism? In a 2005 Village Voice story about cannibal fetishism, Katherine Gates wrote that “[c]annibalism has existed around the globe and throughout history, but perhaps only in the 21st century has it become an erotic lifestyle.” Indeed, the Internet is a wonderland for aspiring erotic cannibals. In 2006, a German man named Armin Meiwes was sentenced to life in prison after killing and consuming a willing victim whom he met online. Both Mucha and Brown used Yahoo Messenger to chat with likeminded perverts. Various websites and discussion groups cater to the fetish, including one I’m not happy to have found that's called “The Butcher Shop.” The “femcan” community also attracts men who are aroused by the thought of being cooked and eaten by women. “Hi, I'm a female cannibal and I like to eat males,” writes “Rita B. Flesh,” the organizer of a “group for real female cannibals and men who want to be eaten by us.” How will they eat you? “We will either butcher you or cook you in a big oven. During the summer, we may also roast you on a spit.” (Online cannibalism fantasies invariably include spits.)

Cannibalism is a real thing. Sometimes it's a ritual practice, as with the pre-industrial Maori of New Zealand, who would eat their enemies during wartime. ("I get very upset with anthropologists who say that we ate the brain to gain the knowledge of our enemies and their hearts to gain their courage. Fiddle-faddle, we ate them because those are the best parts," an indignant contemporary Maori told Carole Travis-Henikoff in her book Dinner with a Cannibal.) Other times it's a survival tactic, as with the stranded Uruguayan rugby team immortalized in Piers Paul Read's Alive. Sometimes, bad drug trips are to blame—earlier today, I wrote about Big Lurch, the cannibal rapper; and a Florida man named Rudy Eugene was allegedly under the influence of “bath salts” when he ate a homeless man’s face this spring. And it's important to note that the dismemberment and subsequent stewing of body parts does not necessarily constitute cannibalism. Though 68-year-old Frederick Hengl was recently arrested after authorities found segments of his dead wife cooking on their stove, the DA found "no evidence of cannibalism." (Perhaps Hengl was just trying to dispose of the body. Perhaps he just liked the smell.)

Sexually motivated cannibalism is a real thing, too. In the early 20^th century, a New York house painter named Albert Fish was executed for kidnapping, molesting, and eating several children. Fish composed several disturbing letters in which he described the thrill he got from eating flesh. (His final letter, composed hours before he was executed, was described by his shocked attorney as “the most filthy string of obscenities that I have ever read.”) Later, the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was said to have ingested his victims.

But today’s online communities seem unlikely to be harboring a bunch of Dahmers. It’s pretty clear that places like “The Butcher Shop” are for sharing outlandish sexual fantasies, not plotting schemes to capture and eat people. That 2005 Village Voice article noted that, Armin Meiwes notwithstanding, online “rumors of genuine cannibalism are invoked to ramp up sexually desirable anxiety,” and that “almost every person who claims to want to go through with it is just a poseur.”

That may have been the case with all three men who were recently arrested for their supposed cannibalistic intentions. There is no evidence that any of the accused actually followed through on their elaborate plans. By creating detailed files on potential victims and making lists of the items he would need to carry out his scheme (a car, some rope, chloroform), “cannibal cop” Valle was possibly pursuing a disturbing fetish, one that’s very easy to mistake for a criminal conspiracy. But while Valle didn’t drug, kidnap, or roast anyone in his oversized oven, he did illegally access the National Crime Information Center database to help build his distressingly detailed victim files. (He also boasted of his desire to become a professional kidnapper, which doesn’t help his case.)

As for Brown and Mucha, both men were independently corresponding with a Kansas man named Michael Arnett. All three were arrested as part of Operation Holitna, an international child pornography investigation. Arnett apparently helped stoke each man’s fantasies of eroticized child cannibalism; when Arnett was arrested, authorities found photographs of an infant in a roasting pan. If these guys aren’t cannibals, they’re certainly pedophiles. And that’s scary enough.

We all know that Ritalin is great for calming unruly children and helping college students cram for their midterms. But does it also help fight crime? The New York Times recently wrote up a study that purportedly showed that those who suffer from “serious attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” are less likely to commit crimes when they’re taking their medication. Pam Belluck reports:

Of 8,000 people whose medication use fluctuated over a three-year period, men were 32 percent less likely and women were 41 percent less likely to have criminal convictions while on medication. Patients were primarily young adults, many with a history of hospitalization. Crimes included assault, drug offenses and homicide as well as less serious crimes. Medication varied, but many took stimulants like Ritalin.

Though the study is preliminary, the results make some sense, if you assume that at least some criminal behavior stems from chemical imbalances in the brain. But the most interesting question raised by the Times story came from a Yale School of Public Health professor, who wondered if “[ADHD] medication is reducing crime or ‘making better criminals,’ who avoid arrest.”

Can drugs make better criminals? Beta-blockers like propranolol help stifle performance anxiety; this might be of use to bank robbers, safecrackers, or anyone else whose plans require steady hands and a controlled demeanor. Anabolic steroids can help you build muscle mass, which would be useful if your plan involves feats of speed or strength, such as racing out of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with a gigantic sack of gold. Other drugs might be of some short-term use to crooks, but they usually carry unpleasant side effects. PCP, some say, bestows super-strength, but it also bestows crazy behavior; ask the rapper Big Lurch, currently serving a life sentence for killing and eating his roommate while under the influence. And while you’re on MDMA, you’ll have an enhanced appreciation for visual stimuli. This may help you detect the laser field guarding the jewels you’re planning to steal, but it will also make you roll around the floor in an ecstatic ball, which will probably lead to your arrest.

So what about Ritalin? The drug, a stimulant that helps its users focus, listen, and organize their behavior, may well help discourage ADHD sufferers from committing spur-of-the-moment crimes—if you’re concentrating on the task at hand, you’re much less likely to abandon it when you’re struck by the impulse to go rob a drug dealer.

But it’s also entirely plausible that impulse control makes for better criminals. A jittery, hyperactive thief seems more likely to get caught or make a stupid mistake than one who has his nerves under control. As a user of such medication myself, I can say with confidence that the nefarious plots I conceive while on my meds are much more focused and plausible than the stuff I come up with when unmedicated. If your criminality involves long-term planning—if, for example, you are involved in an elaborate heist that requires you to memorize the blueprints to a museum—then a stimulant might be just the thing you need to succeed.

Hi, I'm Justin Peters, intrepid freelancer and general liability. Earlier this month, I wrote about my efforts to infiltrate the ranks of Manhattan hipster circles by growing a beard and shaving my pubes. Now, I'll be your guide to another seamy, amoral underworld.

Welcome to Slate's new crime blog, which we’ve imaginatively titled “Crime.” Consider it your cheerful, insatiably curious guide to everything illegal. I'll be examining the wide world of crime, punishment, and recidivism on a daily basis, writing about the most murderous gatmen and the most devious yeggs.

Why a crime blog? Mercy, everyone loves crime. More to the point, though, there's a dearth of smart, non-sensationalistic crime coverage on the Internet these days. I plan to write about horrible things in a non-horrible manner.

What are my qualifications? Well, I was burglarized last year, which was unsettling. (As it turns out, I have nothing of value to steal, which was even more unsettling.) I was a background extra in the movie Curly Sue, so I've got unparalleled insight into crimes involving homeless grifters with hearts of gold and their adorably sassy adopted daughters. I've read everything ever written by Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, and Franklin W. Dixon. And, of course, every Christmas I go down to the homeless shelter and distribute cakes laced with arsenic.

In short, I'm just the sort of preening, narcisisstic sociopath you'd want writing a blog like this. Much of the blog will be devoted to covering high-profile criminals—your Clark Rockefellers and Joran van der Sloots. I'll try to avoid parroting the TMZ/Nancy Grace line on these sorts of stories, and try to find original angles. (Forget Clark Rockefeller—who’s the best female con artist of all-time?) I'll also try to find "crime-y" angles into popular news stories. For example, there's been a lot of talk lately about the Powerball jackpot getting up to $425 million. I might cover that story by writing about the unlucky Jack Whittaker, who won a $314.9 million jackpot in 2002 only to be arrested for DUI, get repeatedly victimized by thieves, and have his granddaughter and daughter turn up dead. Take heed, lottery patrons!

The rest of the blog will be devoted to my personal obsessions. For starters, I'm interested in sentencing practices, prisons, and the realities of day-to-day police work. I also wonder how today's roughnecks and jobbers would stack up against the hoodlums of yesteryear. I like to read about times when burglars get trapped in chimneys, or jewel thieves accidentally knock over the wrong museum. And I'm also bound and determined to assist my good friend O.J. Simpson in his search for the real killers.

We'll figure out the rest as it happens. I'm going to rely on you, the reader, to send me tips, questions, and ideas. I love getting email at justintrevett@fastmail.fm, so don't be shy. I’m looking forward to this beat. See you on the crime side.